Case Study - How to Beat Google and Rank #2 for Viagra

I have been following the keyword "Viagra" lately and have noticed a website creep up the ranking ladder. Most of the sites do belong on the front page of Google, such as: Viagra.com, Wikipedia, howstuffworks, etc.

So... I was wondering how did http://www.sildenafilcitrate.com rank for the keyword "Viagra" and stay on top of the Google search results for the past 2+ weeks?

1. The domain name http://www.sildenafilcitrate.com is the medical/technical name for the active ingredient in Viagra.
   
2. According to Google, the domain has 155 indexed pages (volume of pages that reference Viagra are pretty high).
3. The age of domain is 7 years, 8 months.
   
4. Amount of sites linking to them are 8,562.

According to Yahoo, the top sites linking to them are:

• http://www.bluegrasstours.com
• http://nexstage.org/
• http://soundscenerevolution.com/
• http://losinglucy.com/
• http://www.automagband.com/
• http://www.leadershipcollege.net/

Why would bluegrasstours.com link to a Viagra site? I couldn't find the link on the home page, so let's look at the source code. Here is what I found:

<div id="begin_template"><a href="http://www.sildenafilcitrate.com/">viagra kaufen</a></div><script language="javascript">function setOpacity(a,b){ a.style.opacity=b/10; a.style.filter='alpha(opacity='+b*10+')'; } setOpacity(document.getElementById('begin_template'),'0'); document.getElementById('begin_template').style.display='none'; </script><div id="header">

I thought maybe that was a fluke and all of the other links were clean? Nope, many sites that link to sildenafilcitrate have the same/similar div tag injection on their websites, which makes the link is invisible to users. They probably have thousands of sites (among their 8,000+ links) like this linking to them. Here is some research I found on this black hat tactic.

So...why would sildenafilcitrate.com do this? Well, let’s see:

According to wordtracker - 4,067 search "Viagra" each day (approximately). The second position will receive about 12% (according to AOL's data) of the click-throughs. So one week = 3,416 click-throughs. Let's say that the conversion rate is 5%, which would equal about 171 orders online. This, of course, is only a rough estimate and does not take into consideration the long-tail keywords. Overall, they make a crap load of money and provide users with another spamming Viagra website.

So...that is how you beat Google and rank #2 for the keyword "Viagra."

I hope you found this case study useful, and that you leave your thoughts on this tactic.