Liane - 11:41 pm on May 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

internetheaven, I share your confusion. Today alone, I found 18 sites which had absolutely no business on the 1st page of the SERPS. The majority were cloaking ... and not in a way which could possibly be deemed acceptable by a jury of our peers. They were blatantly cheating and no explanation could excuse their abuses.

Next to no content - links with keywords like "Directory", "Catalogue", "Links", "Products", etc. which went absolutely nowhere! Very few inbound links which were from anything other than their own sites ... yet there they are, right up there with several other well deserving fraudulent directories!

To whomever said that the days of keyword stuffing are long gone ... I beg to differ. Today (at least), it is working really, really well!

I found a cloaked site today (#1 of course) which delivered entirely different content to the search engine than that which the user sees. The text the search engine was fed was totally keyword stuffed! Heck, the webmaster didn't even bother trying to mimic the page the user sees. He just put up a text file using lots of H1 tags and a string of keywords followed by a couple of nonsensical paragraphs followed by another string of keywords.

I found another site (also #1) for a relatively competitive search term which was not cloaked and read like:

If you plan to take a keyword keyword keyword keyword vacation in the keyword keyword keyword, our keyword keyword keyword keyword will be ideal! Consider using keyord keyword keyword keyword ... and so on.

AND, I'm talking about the very same keywords being repeated over and over and over again! If I owned that site I would be thoroughly embarassed.

This particular site had been banned or penalized for the better part of the past 6 months following the Florida update. All of a sudden, it and many others have made a reappearance.

I am not going to panic just yet. I am praying that this is just a minor and temporary glitch which will be fixed soon! Perhaps I'll take a couple of days off and wait for the dust to settle. :)