Multiple identical pages

on my competitor's site

[Chevy]

A competitor has multiple pages that are identical, but have different filenames. He links to each of them from the Home page. I am not sure why he does this, and I wonder if Google will pick up on it.

He has something like this:

Dallas Texas Widgets
Blue Widgets Sales

At a casual glance, it appears each phrase is a link, but a closer look reveals that each WORD is a seperate link, each going to an identical page, but not the same page.

(2 go to dallas_blue_widgets.htm
1 to dallas_things_sales.htm
1 to dallas_texas_widgets.htm
1 to dallas_widgers_sales.htm
1 to dallas_bluewidgets_sales.htm,
but all the pages are identical content)

What is his purpose?
Will this eventually bite him in the butt? :) Thanks in advance for replies.

[John_Creed]

Because they all go to identical pages, when a user clicks the "link" he goes to the right content that he asked for.

So the only purpose for this appears to be in fooling Google. Report him if you'd like.

Google is working on better ways to detect this, however that may take a while. If at all.

[heini]

Looks like he has duplicate content. I would say this is one of the things the SEs are pretty quick to catch on, since indexing and analysing the page's content is what they do anyway.

[Chevy]

Thanks for the replies.

What does he gain by having 5 copies of the same content?

[Marcia]

>>What does he gain by having 5 copies of the same content?

For one thing, it's moving PR around the site. There may be inbound external links to some of the interior pages - you'd have to check that out - and if they exist you're liable to find it interesting who they belong to, what the PR of those is, and how they handle inbound anchor text to interior pages.

Then, it's a matter of multiple instances of anchor text within and throughout the site. Check that out as well as the page titles of the duped pages, and then back-track to the pages linking to the pages linking to those and examine them also.

Added:
>>the pages linking to the pages linking to those<<

That isn't a typo.

[DVDBurning]

"What does he gain by having 5 copies of the same content?"

In general, the larger your site, the more pages that link back to the home page (the more "votes" for the home page), the higher the PR of the home page. If this cheating webmaster is creating 5 pages for every real page of content, he or she is trying to artificially inflate the PR of the home page.

As Marcia pointed out, this also allows the cheating webmaster to use different anchor text for the many links back to the home page, which would cause the home page to become relevant for more search phrases.

[Marcia]

>>He links to each of them from the Home page. I am not sure why he does this

That's diluting the amount of PR passed on to pages linked to from the homepage, but if individual words are being used as anchor text, they're probably different for each version of the page, and in various combinations, if they're linked to from other pages on the site, they could dramatically increase the number of search terms ranked for.

If the pages didn't have multiple duplicate copies it wouldn't be spam, it would be just plain smart.