As a follow up to my last post, he was actually using negative positioning on the homepage of wordpress.org to link to these SPAM articles.

For you non CSS HTML people out there what he basically did was put the text on the page but then tell the browser to move it off the screen so when you look at the page you can't see it. However, when a search engine looks at the page they see the links and follow them.

Interestingly enough this is exactly the type of nasty stuff I was talking about in my search engine optimization article I posted the other day.

"I'm going to assume throughout this article that you want to create some brand loyalty and customer retention and generally be a good net citizen. My advice would be somewhat different if you were just trying to maximize your visits with no regard to the visitors experience. Since I don't like sites like that I'm not writing for you. (you can leave now)"