Monkscuba - 10:08 am on May 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

"If a competitor got a free deal with another competitor to list his domain on every page of the catalogue > would this bother anyone?"

No, but on line they can hide it, yet it still counts for something. I was just wondering who gets penalised - the one doing the hidden links, or the one being linked to?

"If a competitor distributed 3 different catalogues > would this bother anyone?"

Somehow, with a real life catalogue, it's easier to see that they are all part of the same junk mail. On line it's easier to pretend that they are all different. When a set of results come up on Google, it's like the message board that takagi wrote about. Very hard to tell from just a few word snippet that you are looking at the same thing several times. The average user will still click on it if it's at the top, and will have no idea what sneaky hidden methods may have been used to get there.

Spam is a worrying issue. I have not knowingly used any naughty tactics, but still worry that I may have done something wrong without knowing about it, since, in reality I am not a web pro, just someone who reads Webmaster world and gets enough from here to get good rankings, thanks very much. :)