How long is a "ban"?

[dodger]

I complained about a site in December and they were banned -a very bad case of suffed keywords into pages that used (I think) an IP redirect.

Here's the thread -
[webmasterworld.com...]

Now they are back in again - only 3 and a half months - if that's all it takes to get back in no wonder people ignore the rules - I was impressed with Google at the time - no so much now.

It's certainly worth the risk if you only get "banned' for a few months.

These people went to a lot of trouble to fool Google and almost got away with it - do you think a 3 month ban will discourage them? neither do I, and if they succeed then all their competitiors will have to follow.

I would like to hear from "GoogleGuy" about this.

[Jon_King]

It is possible we are missing the mark here - I'll bet there are significant legal ramifications (which are not being discussed) that will shape what will be done.

i.e. The exposure to lawsuits will drive the policy.

[The_Hitcher]

Kinda glad I started this thread now. On an optimistic note, the spam appears to have ground to a halt now although at its worst, the bouncebacks were coming in thousands. I used a spamtrap to at least make my inbox useable. It seems to be back to normal spam now at leasr. Very difficult to stop email forgery when alls said and done.

Great that certain countries are taking a stance - notably Australia who I believe recently brought in legislation, but it needs a global approach to have any effect. Anyone fancy telling the Russians not to do it? Or the Chinese? Or Nigeria? Er.......

[Robber]

I would think that bearing in mind Google crawls frequently the penalty should exist whilst the spam exists. Once removed the site can rank freely again. A long term ban (thats not part of the main algo) must surely be harder to police and will inevitably catch people undeservedly as others have stated, eg new domain ownership, change of webmaster, justified use of text on image based sites, google being to sensitive perhaps and catching text that matches page bgcolor when its actually in a table with a different bgcolor (I imagine some css rules may complicate capturing hidden text a bit with loads of layers and different positioning rules etc).

By penalty though I dont think this should be manual implementation, just part of the algo, otherwise theres no way realistically that the guys at G could keep up with all the changes. When G crawls and the site offends penalise it, when it crawls and its clean, dont.

Would it be feasible to give a slight tweak to the algo that gives "negative points" to techniques such as hidden text (it seems there are definite "plus points" at the moment). This would be great because at the moment I am seeing a fair bit of this kind of spam near the top - literally 4 or 5 words repeated hundreds of times at the bottom of the page in invisible text or in invisible divs.

If they can get it in the algo these sites will disappear and people will realise they have to build sites properly when their ranks improve as a result of removing the offending item(s).

If its a long term ban the offenders will just by another throw away domain and do it again until it gets picked. If its part of the regular algo there will be far less incentive to do this.