[thelist] More on Search Engines

[Jeff Howden]

russ,

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> From: Russ
>
> But, as far as I can tell, a spider won't be able to
> recognize that this is happening.
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they will for sure when someone reports it to the engine as spam.

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> They're doing it on several pages, not just their own
> doorway pages--call it SPAM if you like, but it's still
> individual pages that have some technology that
> customizes a pre-determined set of copy and replaces
> certain words based on the page you came through.
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i *highly* doubt there's any text customization going on at all.  there'd be
*zero* benefit.  why?  well, search engines don't click links so the
visitors that this site'd gain the most from customizing the text for aren't
coming from a page.   these doorway pages (which is what they are no matter
if there are a few or hundreds) aren't designed for humans so it's not like
users are clicking links to drive some sort of magic text-replacement engine
anyway.

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> It might not APPEAR to be legit to the rest of the
> planet, but I'm pretty sure a spider cannot pick up on
> their copy appearing as hidden since a spider isn't
> going to be able to recognize a location based upon
> CSS, and especially since a spider won't have the
> CSS applied for it; it'll simply appear as text on
> the page to the spider.
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the hidden copy is for the poor, unsuspecting human that lands on one of
these pages without javascript.  it's probably an attempt to make the page
not look like search engine spam to humans that see it so it's less likely
to get reported.

.jeff

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