What is this nasty technique called?

[davebarnes]

Surf to <www.richvos.com> and you will find a page that belongs to the comedian: Rich Vos. That page is index.htm
Surf to <www.richvos.com/index.html> (the l makes all the difference) and scroll down and you will see links to over a thousand almost identical pages.

This company also owns other domains such as: dallasreporting.com

In fact, if you search on Google for "digital court reporting and video" (the quotes are important), you will find over 500 of these almost identical pages.

I don't know if this violates Google's rules, but it is certainly immoral, in my opinion.

Does this technique have a name?

[cw1865]

That's weird because the court reporting and the comedian is a complete non-sequitor.

I'm not sure how having 'richvos.com' is actually helping them.

The domains on the bottom is their way of trying to seize geographic searches. The body is either pics or flash and they're hoping google can't see the duplicate content.

If they're somehow hijacking richvos.com that is clearly immoral. ASSUMING they own the website, there's nothing objectionable to the content itself. At the end of the day its their website, its their call.

[davebarnes]

That's weird because the court reporting and the comedian is a complete non-sequitur.
I'm not sure how having 'richvos.com' is actually helping them.

If you search for "court reporting InsertUSCityHere" or "court reporters InsertUSCityHere", then one of their links shows up in the top 10/20.

And, you don't see anything wrong with having a 1000+ pages with almost identical content?

[cw1865]

I think its the epitome of laziness and I think the connection to the comedian is just plain weird; but unless there is something inherently misleading or illegal about the ad itself its just protected commercial speech, albeit repeated ad nauseum.

I have read many times about how unique content is critical and I do subscribe to that theory, but at the end of the day I am really only publishing product catalogs.

The second problem is the nature of the query. Court reporting is a personal service requiring a physical presence, so if you do a quick search for 'court reporter' you may find an LA based service, but alas you are in nyc, ny, so you quickly refine and narrow your search to 'court reporter, nyc, ny'

When I worked in Manhattan I would watch very drab, persistent type efforts at advertising aimed simply on being seen. You would see people handing out the same flyers, day after day, advertising money exchange services (or haircuts, you name the service) with some poor guy wearing a placard over his body, locksmiths putting 24hr 212-555-1212 stickers over locks so that when they break they are the first number in front of the customer's eyes. Other businesses even resort to placing several 'A's in front of their name so that they will be first in a phone book, ie. "AAAAAAA Tires of New York" (they actually do this). This sort of advertising isn't very glamorous, chic, and is even, at times, bothersome, but the simple message to the throngs of people passing by was very simple, 'I'm here'

[incrediblehelp]

Just a bunch of doorway mad lib spam pages to me. It happens in many industries and still works great on Google.

For instance I work with some clients in the plastic surgery field and I see competitors spamming Google with these types of pages all of the time. Take a look at this website and the links below the fold:

Plastic Surgery: Breast Augmentation, Breast Implants, Plastic Surgeons

Same thing.

[davebarnes]

For instance I work with some clients in the plastic surgery field and I see competitors spamming Google with these types of pages all of the time....Same thing.

One big difference between the plastic surgery page you mentioned and dallasreporting.com.
The plastic surgery page has text, lots of text.
The Dallas Reporting page has this text: Court Reporter Dallas|Texas|Dallas Court Reporters|Court Reporting Agency Dallas, Texas|Video Conference Room
and only this text. All the other 1000+ pages are the same. All images and just one line of text.

[incrediblehelp]

Sure Dave not exactly the same thing but it looks like both are trying to achieve the same results. I know LYB does very well in the SE's

[Dubbya]

Interesting find Dave,

Why not read what Matt Cutts thinks about all this?
A quick word about cloaking

Just occurred to me, which page does the Googlebot see when it spiders the site? "htm" or "html"?

Check for cloaking. Surf like Googlebot!
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more...ragentswitcher

In Firefox, Tools->User Agent Switcher->Options, add Googlebot as a user agent:

Description: Googlebot
User Agent: Googlebot/2.1 ( How Google crawls my site)

Then switch to the Googlebot user agent.

(This will only work if they're not detecting Googlebot using IP's.)

[mjtaylor]

Just occurred to me, which page does the Googlebot see when it spiders the site? "htm" or "html"?

If there are links to both, Google will spider/see both ...

MJ

[davebarnes]

Just occurred to me, which page does the Googlebot see when it spiders the site? "htm" or "html"?

Surf to Google and search on site:richvos.com

Google returns 900+ pages.