Addendum

More sharp practice?

[NickJAllen]

Another competitor has a site which appears like a general "widget" shop. But in fact, on the first page, all the various types of widgets listed are actually links to other sites e.g. blue_widget goes to "blue widget.com". Red widget goes to Red_widget.com.

At red_widget.com there is another page of links to pages like big_red_widgets.net.

And so you plough through the links and sites until you get to your product.

Now its not exactly a great shopping experience - and I notice their PR has slipped to 2/3 (compared to my honest 5/6).

But is this spam or not - what's the name for this type of "optimisation"?

[ciml]

If the site has a normal hierrarchy structure, does it makes much difference to usability if the pages are one one domain or 20?

> what's the name for this type of "optimisation"?

Misguided. :) The approach won't do much to help getting listed higher in Google unless it encourages more links (eg. ODP) into those sub-pages.

It might help with other engines, though.

Old fashioned search engine spam was often getting a site multiple listings for the same phrase. The use of multiple domains escapes Google's 'clustering' feature. Personally, I'd rather have one top listing for a long time than twenty listings for one phrase for a short while until I got caught.

[NickJAllen]

Apologies if this is getting tedious, but I've just checked *another* major competitor, and they have about 100 keywords hidden at the top of the page by what looks like tiny text squeezed into a <tr> that isn't high enough.

When I increase the text size in the code there is a huge header full of keywords.

I'm starting to feel a little dismayed! Essentially, 2 out of 3 of my main competitors are spamming - and Google hasn't spotted it.

I'm still up there with them though - so maybe their spamming doesn't work that well.

Worth reporting?

[ciml]

> so maybe their spamming doesn't work that well

Precisely!

Take a look at Brett's Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com] article and my Theme Pyramids and Google [webmasterworld.com] article and compare these approaches to the spam you're describing.

A hundred cross-linked domains with the target words repeated on each a hundred times in hidden text will not beat a sensibly optimised site with good incoming links.

[NickJAllen]

Thanks