Smart spamming

Are search engines fooled by this?

[Theremin]

(new to this forum so apologies if some of this has been covered before)
Recently came across a setup engaged in "smart spamming". Met a disgruntled ex-employee who explained how it was done. Firstly the site dynamically generates literally thousands of pages using a database based keyword list. The page title and metatags are individually generated for each page and every page has multiple links to other generated pages. Because of the "size" of the site search engines appear to engage in a deep crawl until every page is indexed.

The site then varies page delivery depending on specific chosen keywords and on who requests it. If the request comes from a robot (this is detected by ip address, host name or browser type) the original generated page is delivered. If anyone else requests the page, e.g. by clicking on returned results from a search, they are taken to the site's front page or catalog.

Opinions?!

[Hennatron]

Hi Theremin,

Welcome to the board.

The first part of the strategy sounds good, assuming you are not intending to spam the indexes.

the second part is known as "cloaking" and is likely to get you penalised in the search engines - very likely if it is successful, but this all depends on your intent.

Cloaking is when you show one set of content or page to the robot and a different set of content or page when a user visits. As you correctly stated this is done on user agent or known IP.

There are several reasons why you would cloak, and probably not be penalised, perhaps you have an extremely dynamic site, and you need to generate a real time static version of the dynamic site to serve to the robots.

In your scenario is the page shown to the robot an accurate representation in terms of content and products of the dynamic page?

H

[Theremin]

Hi H,

No, the page delived to the user is completely different. The robot page is an information article - the user page is a catalog front page. The other aspect is that out of the thousands of pages generated and indexed only certain chosen keyword pages are cloaked - the rest are delivered as is. This would make it more difficult for a SE to detect as 99% of the site isn't cloaked.

Any opinions on site size influence on ranking?