[thelist] More on Search Engines

Russ russ at unrealisticexpectations.com
Wed Dec 10 06:32:56 CST 2003


> Russ wrote:
> 
> > Granted, I'm making some semi-educated guesses here, but these guys
> > appear to be legitimately beating the system by fooling any 
> relatively
> > modern browser into not seeing the copy.
> 
> Not legitimate. The SE's don't like any text that is deliberately 
> written for the SE's and hidden to users.
> 
> Andy Budd
> 

But, as far as I can tell, a spider won't be able to recognize that this
is happening.

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.

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.

No one has to like this; I certainly don't.  I'm merely pointing out
what they're doing AND that they're getting results for it.



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