how illegal are gateway pages

a company rang me up today offering to completely optimise our site by building a mirror site of it and fully optimising that, but no-one woul see it cos it would jump straight to our usual site. I was under the impression this was illegal and will get you booted off of search engines? Can they really offer this service? Bit new to all this SEO lark!

It isn't illegal as no law has been passed so no one will be thrown in jail. However, if you are showing search engines one page (keyword stuffed) and visitors another (real page) which is what you are describing, it is in violation of Googles TOS which will result in a ban.

Of course some people can get away with it for a few months but do you want to take the chance?

On the other hand, there is always the "notion" that you can't be banned for something you COULD be the innocent victim of. So if you go for this (which I personally would NOT) and it results in a ban, you can always buy similar pages for your competitors ;)

But I doubt it will do wonders (on Google) anyway. Why should a spammy page with crappy backlinks (I presume) rank high...? Or do you only need the extra nudge, to go from #2 to #1 for example?

yeah cheers I wasn't goin to go for it as its an expensive way to get banned from google! But I just wanted to check I wasn't being over cautious and that I had the right info - thanks peeps!

Just to add some information, a big hotel chain in Norway was banned today because of this type of optimization. According to what I have understood, it could have been a manuel ban. (Maybe sorvoja can fill me in on this since you are normally more informed than me).