Smart Spamming

[Theremin]

I am aware of a couple of sites that are engaged in what can only be described as "smart spamming". The technique is to generate numerous keyword/ phrase specific pages (database driven) but only serve these to the robots. Any page request is checked against a list of known IP addresses or host names (e.g. googlebot) for robot requests and the dedicated keyword page is served. This page is carefully tuned for the desired keyword and also links to other keyword pages which the robot duly spiders.

When, however, the page is requested by a non robot (i.e. - everyone else) the user is taken straight to the site operator's desired page - normally the front page of their site or a catalog page. In Google it is quite easy to check for this - view the cached page against where the main link takes you.

I think this may be breaking the rules! Any opinions?

[adore]

It's called cloaking - you can find a lot of resources here about that.
It's spam.

[kikkertm]

Good will be the day the googlebot will break this behaviour... It's bad. It polutes the index and is causing skewed results (and it's unfair to honest folk)

Why doesn't Google just imitate IE or Opera ? The Bot could so simply surf around one day being the Google bot and the next day visit the same site while faking the USER_AGENT property to Mozilla/IE6 or something.. That way they could easily weed out the spammers (googleguy ? are you reading ?)

[Kenai Alaska]

See the post Google and Spam. This guy just serves the pages to the public http://www.alaskaguidesdirectory.com/