[kleevr]

My first computer job as a teen was working at a small SEO shop (3 people) writing little cgi/perl scripts for this and that.

Yahoo's http server at that time used to take redirect URLs in this format: "http://yahoo/url/*http://exiturl/. They were using these URLs on all search results, I'm guessing to track click-throughs to improve rankings. So I set up a script on our site to load an image using this format with the img src in the exit-url, and for the yahoo-url and we would round robin 'client' links though. Essentially spoofing legitimate search&clicks on yahoo from unique IPs from our site visitors. Over the next two weeks all our sites started bubbling up in the results. This worked for about a month before Yahoo changed something (I'd guess they started validating the http-referrer or the exit-url), and it all stopped working.

But, for that brief window of time when it was working, I was the king of the high fives.

(FWIW, I don't do SEO work of any kind anymore, and I certainly don't advocate 'blackhat seo'.)