I ran across a site that has a few hundred backlinks in G. I casually checked the backlinks and found that none of them actually had links to the Web site, nor did they appear to be engaged in a link exchange or other linking program. The linking domains appear to be from major sites, but in fact are not. It looks like someone registered a lot of domainnames similar to the big name sites, but tacked "online" onto the real site's domain name. It also appears that they cloned the sites of some rather large companies. It gets better than that. When you view the code on most of the backlinks, you find that it is just a frameset with a link to a nonsensical domain name (random characters). If you enter that domain name, you are usually redirected to the real site for the big name company. This is obviously a black hat scheme. Can anyone explain how this works? I understand the use of the shadow domain (the frameset domain) and understand the redirection (presumably to fool the sucker client in to thinking they are actually obtaining links from the real sites), but I don't see how the link-to site is picking up the backlinks with no actual links to their site. Sorry I cannot provide sample links. There are other issues involved here.