Is it spam? And can 'they' be caught/penalized?

Well-known company places content verrry far down the home page.

[waterwoman]

A website design customer brought this to my attention...
The homepage for a well-known company has placed beautiful graphics and short descriptions for navigation and introduction in the first screenfull.
Underneath: a table with height=2000 - several screenfulls of absolute blank. At the very bottom, in small, but readable dark grey type, proper English and all, is a large paragraph listing everything they sell with every keyword and phrase mentioned the appropriate 1-3 times, even to including the most common mispellings of the company's name.

Oooo, I am sooo tempted to duplicate!

It's obviously intended for spiders, not customers, but it violates no rules. Food for customers at the top of the page, where they expect it, food for spiders way, way down at the bottom where it won't interfere with customers, but is not hidden. Placing it in a long table, and keeping the top navigation very clean resulted in the spider content being very close to the top html-wise, but far away visually.

Before I give in to temptation, I would love to have comments! My own websites are very focussed on Google rankings.

Mahalo!

[NovaW]

Don't do it - it is spam & it's doubtful that it would bring too much benefit anyway

[korkus2000]

Don't do it. Most engines will penalize you for that in a hand check. It will be considered hidden text. You are hiding it from your visitor.

[waterwoman]

Thanks! As usual, if something seems too good to be true, it is. I shall turn away once again from the Dark Side, and get back to those dratted newsletters (adding content).

[Sasquatch]

The simple rule I use is "will it help the human surfer?"

If there is anything at all that you can spend your time on that will legitimately improve your ranking, why bother spending your time with something like this.

Find a way to add some real content that will do what they are trying to do. Take some pride at beating them without having to resort to such stupid tactics.

[stuntdubl]

If you really think it is unfair, you can submit it to the 'Google Police' too. Somewhere in this forum Google Guy has posted the link to the spam reporting form.