Str82u - 4:50 pm on Feb 10, 2013 (gmt 0)

it seems really clear to me that spam is still working

Keyword stuffing, doorway pages, duplicate content; all of it is working for my competitors.

Matt Cutts made a point of showing results for phone number searches [plus.google.com...] saying "it's not really useful and a bad user experience" - we search for phone numbers daily and saw a slight fluctuation in those results but they returned to normal a short time later with only the exact type of sites in his example in his post missing most of the time. The remaining sites aren't any different, just laid out differently and with larger budgets; the site that belongs to the phone number rarely shows up even when surrounded by quotation marks "like this".

We aren't in the phone number niche but we see the same techniques in ours. The example relates to the original post in that these are all useless sites unless you're willing to pay for the information but it will take average users a few clicks to find out they need their wallet.