Gadgetopia

Netcraft reports that a hosting provider in San Diego got busted for sniffing for the Google spider and feeding it phony links to their own web site whenever it indexed any of the sites they hosted.

Aplus.Net admitted Friday that it had manipulated customer web sites to try and improve its ranking in the Google search engine, inserting “hidden links” that made it appear that more than 17,000 sites were linking to Aplus.net’s home page. The technique may have helped Aplus.net achieve a first-place Google ranking for the term “dedicated servers.”

While it’s a low-down dirty trick, you have to marvel at the ingenuity.