Question about "unethical" sites

[kevin_svek]

I've just been doing a search on web sites in my local town and found a site which I thought was new in the area, however, it's appearing in various search engines due to heavy keyword loading and lots of hidden content (I'm sure you've all seen this before!)

 

The site in question is in the directory, but is it a valued site if it's actually hiding half of it's content using javascript to get nice rankings?

 

The site is in

http://dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/West_Sussex/East_Grinstead/Business_and_Economy/Computers_and_Internet/

as dynamic webs.

 

Just a personal gripe that when half of the source download of a page doesn't even appear for the viewer, I don't feel that they are behaving ethically - albeit I understand that it does help ratings.

 

End of rant for today

 

Regards

Kevin

[jeanmanco]

The standard answer here is that the ODP judges sites via human eyeballs. We look at what the human user sees, rather than the robot. The source code doesn't matter to us generally.

 

However we are aware that sites may not be quite what they seem. Sites may be designed simply for search engines and have limited/no value to the human user. You might be interested in a recent addition to Guidelines: http://dmoz.org/guidelines/include.html#spider .

 

However the new Guidelines don't bar sites simply for hidden text. This site meets our Guidelines. If the webmaster chooses to run the risk of being barred by Google for deceptive practices, that is his business. Tricks may provide short-term gain in search engine results, but a penalty could be paid eventually.

[kevin_svek]

Thanks Jean, I was not criticising the editor in that category, it's just that although this technique is used heavily by other sites, it's one of the first ones I've stumbled across that's successfully stayed in the ODP. And thanks for the link, I agree with you that on the basis of the content when you go further into the site that it seems a valid contribution - even if it does remove the "powered by oscommerce"

notice on oscommerce web sites that it's produced! (which is not an ODP issue)