A while ago (really, a while ago) I pointed out GenieKnows and how they were hiding links in blog comments using a smile emoticon.

So yesterday I ran into some news about how they had relaunched, were doing a lot of traffic, and so

forth. I was very surprised myself when I saw that Compete.com showed them with 2.3 million visitors a month – not bad! Even more impressive was that all the traffic began a few months – what a spike!

Of course, things were not as they seemed. Compete is nice enough to show us a breakdown of traffic by subdomain – in this case, it seems like feed.genieknows.com was their main traffic conduit. And some simple searching brought light on their methodology: annoying spyware that hijacks your URLs.

Just wonderful stuff.