Different SPAM guidelines for some wellborn website?

[roooo]

Are there different guidelines and SPAM laws for some wellborn websites, and other rules to the rest of us?
How come that companies that use massive substantialy double content on their websites to increase search engine visibility don't get a penalty for breaking this basic guideline? I could fill this email with such examples.

You can see Google bold preference is also for about.com. For example take a look at their sitemap, with thousands of links only, it was built just for search engines.

show me one human being that can get benefit from this sitemap... If I was building such sitemap like on my websites I would have been banned in a snap.

You may also find TONS of non useful links and ads only pages on about.com, what you call if I'm not mistaken as "pages desined for search engines"

Are these companies bulletproof?

Roy

[edited by: tedster at 5:01 pm (utc) on Jan. 24, 2006]
[edit reason] remove example urls [/edit]

[europeforvisitors]

In the case of sites like About.com and some of the travel "advisor" sites, it may be a matter of sheer scale. And it's possible that, by having a critical mass of useful content, those sites get away with having empty keyword-driven template pages and the like.

If it's any consolation, the megasites' pages are often beaten in Google's SERPs by competing pages from mom-and-pop sites.