Prefetch attribute had been around for some time but had some limited use as it was supported only in Firefox. Now with an explosive adoption of IE 7 that seems to support this attribute it can open some really good opportunities for not-so-whitehat SEO. If it does what it does uses for this wonderful feature may vary from rather exotic Alexa Cheat to affiliate links (cookie cutters) or a banal Google search spoofing like the following Motorola LZZR search.
There are however some repercussions one must remember about.
- Judging from the Google Webaccelerator FAQ Google itself must well be aware of the fact that the hit in question is not user-initiated from x-moz: prefetch HTTP header sent by Mozilla browsers (it is likely that IE is sending some identifiers in headers too).
- The page with a prefetch link is tracable via referrer header so the whole plot can easily be uncovered
At the same time until most interested parties adapt to this new attribute there is a window of opportunity for this trick especially if used in combination with Javascript and or server side scripting (PHP would be my choice).
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