Ever notice how some sites seem to get away with all kinds of shady SEO tricks that would get your site banned for life if you were to try them yourself? Let's take a look at some recent high-profile examples:

• In 2004, Microsoft.com was found to have a huge number of doorway pages stuffed with nonsense text. These pages were designed to rank well for competitive keywords. A JavaScript redirect was used to make sure no human users ever saw them, but search engine spiders ate these pages up. Of course, such a strategy is a classic spam trick that hundreds, maybe thousands, of sites have been banned for—but no search engine penalty was ever levied on Microsoft.
  
  
• In 2005, blogging software maker WordPress.org was found to have hidden links to over 150,000 articles targeting high-profit keywords like mesothelioma, debt consolidation, and mortgages. Hotnacho.com, the company who created the articles, was quickly banned from the search engines, along with most of the other sites they owned. However, WordPress.org itself was not affected, even though it was hosting these pages and linking to them with hidden links from its own high-PageRank homepage.

These examples are a small tip of the immunity iceberg. There are many other such cases ranging from household-name companies who heavily crosslink between their subsidiary sites to large-scale cloaking of Fortune 500 corporate webpages. Most of these "tricks" would get small business websites penalized or banned—but the big guys seem to be able to use them with impunity. The questions remain...

Why?
...are they benefiting from favoritism?
...or is there some other dynamic at work?
...do they know a secret that you could employ as well?

There is...