Are these subdomains? Redirects?

Are these Subdomains

[baby_gifts]

Can someone please confirm or clarify MY understanding of what this site is doing. This site is a competitior of a very dear friend of mine, who has asked me for help or an explanation.

FYI: I own and operate my own site in another industry.

Here goes:

Let's say the site in question has www.123456789.com (not the real url) as its principal url.

It then also has more than 20 additional urls that are as follows: www.kw1-kw2-kw3.123456789.com, with numerous variations of the "kw1-kw2-kw3." that preceed the root domain name.

Are each of these subdomains? They appear to be subs to me as they preceed the root domain with a period. Am I correct?

Each of these 20 apparent sub-sites redirects to the main after a few seconds.

These sub-sites also have many deceptive seo tactics (lots of keyword stuffing, as well as over 300 text links to the root domain). Please Comment...

[Birdman]

Sounds like an old, worn out, tactic that is surely to get the site banned from Google sooner or later.

Do the subdomains come up in the search results when you search for the keywords in the subdomain?

My best advice is to not worry about it and concentrate on what you can control. Keep working on the site and keep it clean. You'll come out ahead of them in the end. You can also file a spam complaint if you really think the violations are bad(sounds like it).

Birdman

[baby_gifts]

The sad thing is that this site and its subs/redirects occupy the first FIVE PAGES (47 out of top 50 positions) in Google for several of the high traffic keywords.

The nature of their industry is very regional in nature, therefore these tactics to achieve web visibility DOMINANCE is very disturbing to my friend.

I can only think to submit spam reports via Google, however my recent readings of High Rankings (Jill Whalen) lead me to think such reports are actually falling on deaf ears...

In truth, I feel quite bad for the adverse impact this situation is having upon my friend's business. He is a very good businessman and actually provides an excellent product and service. He is experiencing real difficulty in his attempts to effectively market his wares on the web. Of course he knows tha the net is but one leg of his marketing campaign, nonetheless its a viable leg that is, in this case badly compromised.

Any other comments...suggestions? All reasonable ideas welcome.

[encyclo]

It's mad, bad spamming tactics by the competitor - you must file a spam report to Google, but don't hold your breath.

Subdomains can be a legitimate tactic if there is unique content on each, with careful cross-linking - you can build targeted sites at keyword1.example.com, keyword2.example.com.

Are they depending on this method alone for their place in the SERPs? If so, it is their achilles heel - your friend can fight back with a broader choice of SEO - beat the competitor with lots of high-quality content, better backlinks, directory submission, throw a few dollars to Google for some Adwords... Keep it clean, and you'll win in the long run.