Forum Moderators: open
My question is:
Did you see or heard of a hidden text spam penalized by Google(tm) automatically, not manually?
I know that cheating robots with different kinds of styles, scripts, layers, etc. is easy, but what about simple, straightforward, old, stupid <body bgcolor="pink">...<font color="pink">99% of page text content here</font>? I am asking because I know a site (well.. yes, it IS my direct competitor) that is PR7(!) and all its pages are at least PR5(!), which has the following (nothing smart really):
Several affiliate links at the frontpage, a bit of useless text and some hidden text and hidden links at the bottom. Those links lead to site map which has links to other pages with titles like "US state - Nice Widget - New Widget". Each of those pages has only one tect line and paragraph repeating the title and HUGE amount of hidden text at the bottom which includes all possible cities and regions and villages of this state.
Result is that when i search for Texas Widgets or California Widgets, etc, etc they are always in TOP3 result in Google(tm). They are also in top for Anycity Widgets as well! They are doing the same for Canada and Australia! When I use Alexa wayback machine I find that they are doing this for years! And they are nothing but a few stupid affiliate links. And the "Widgets" I am talking about is 2 TOP words of one of the web top 10 industries.
I am sorry for emotional post, but I was really frustrated to see this whereas we were LERNING GOOGLE(tm) DOs and DON'Ts BY HEART and working solely on content and search engine friendly structure and still can't get even close to that stupid spammers.
As far as I understand, PageRank is not growing - it is distributed global PR1, and such PR7 site robs all other sites and webmasters. Maybe WebmasterWorld and Google(tm) would think on creating a third party authority together that would handle spam reports faster and that would be a good PR (not PageRank :) ) action for Google(tm)?
Why that is a problem to compare that color attributes and determine spam? C'mon Google(tm)!
NazaretH
have furthermore a look into this thread [webmasterworld.com].
The only 1% left is my principal question - Does Google(tm) have and use ANY spam filters at all? I really mean ANY. I understand that they might have hard time trying to determine CSS spam, cloaking,etc. But... WHAT do they filter at all if text/body same color spam lives on a PR7 site for years? Please tell me, did anyone here ever see a site banned from Google automatically?
"inktomi seems to have a patent on this"
hmmm. Too bad if true. I guess Zimbabvian policemen must patent a right to catch crimes then.
If your competitor is a PR7 and you are a PR1, then you might not be able to blame only only the hidden text for them beating you. To realistically beat a badly designed PR7, you will probably need at least a PR4. To beat the PR5 pages you should get at least PR3 on those pages that compete against it.
If you think you can't get above PR1, then you are not being creative enough. Go read the link development forum [webmasterworld.com...]
