Circumventing Site Penalty

Site circumvents site penalty to get 1st place in results

[HagenArnold]

Hi all,
There is a site that for some reason offended Google and received a penalty – grey bar. Rather than ditch the domain and start over they created several doorway pages. The doorways offer no content, only links to the penalized site and a laundry list of keywords – like 150 keyword phrases. In fact the penalized site pops up in a separate window when you click their link in results.
So it would seem this is most likely again running a thin line with Google rules. It would seem these are acceptable practices. They only occupy one place – first place in fact, but they have it from underhanded means. Report them, or not?

cheers
Hagen

P.S. The simple code they used is:
window.open('http://www.widgets.com/index.html','_best','resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,toolbar=yes,location=yes,directories=yes,status=yes,menubar=yes');

[Jakpot]

"Report them, or not?"

I vote yes

[DaveAtIFG]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld HagenArnold! :)

Unfortunately, these "report them or not discussions" generally turn into a useless debate over the ethical issues regarding spam reporting and/or the effectiveness of spam reporting.

HagenArnold, ultimately the decision to report/not report is up to you so my vote is to not have a redundant discussion. ;)

If you're interested in previous spam report discussions, a "Site Search" (use the link at the top of your screen, search for "google spam report" or similar) will provide hours of reading.

[Jesse_Smith]

:::window.open('http://www.widgets.com/index.html

Look at this thread,
[webmasterworld.com...]
It looks like he's here trying to get a PR of 5.

[HagenArnold]

Hi DaveAtIFG (and thanks for the Welcome!),
I guess really should have reworded my question. They only have one position in the top ten, even though it is #1. So I really dont care about the "report or don't" and dont want to have that conversation either. So forget that part.
What really has me curious is the method used. I have seen doorways that link to other pages and that seems a very grey area for me. I think Google has a difficult time automating the discovery and penalty phase of regular doorways also. But the automatic display of a penalized site in a separate window seems like a new tactic. Has anyone else seen this? I actually sent Google's search quality team a question along these lines but received no feedback. That is why I brought it here. It would seem that all you need to do to get around a penalty is create doorway with a separate domain, get some quality links (which they did), and keep doing what you are doing. I am curious - have others done similar things with their sites (penalized or not)?
I would be glad to sticky the url if anyone wants to see this for themselves.

regards
Hagen

[Krapulator]

There was a recent discussion on the issue of spam reporting. I can't remember who said it, but the best answer to this question IMHO was:

"If you are so perfect that you would be happy to email the offending competitor/website, telling them who you are (complete with your own url) and tell them to change their ways or you will report them."

then it would be justified. Otherwise don't worry about what other people do and worry about yourself.

Google-Karma!