Forum Moderators: open
<a href="http://www.domain.com"><img src="images/spacer.gif" border="0"></a>
OK, so I can report him, but why can't a smart company like google solve this one?! Seems like it would be easy to grab all of the gifs that are associated with a link for a given site. Write some automated code that lists the image name, hgt, wdth and total bytes. You could start with only pr 7 and up pages to keep a lid on the scope of this. Start writing tickets! I can't see any reason for a gif of under 5 pixels to be associated with a link.
Seems like google has been relying solely on third party reports to find these occurences.
I would never use 1x1 pixels - cause everyone whines. All they have to do is switch it to a 88x31 graphic and all of a sudden it isn't "spam"....
To answer your question - there are legitimate reasons for having 1x1 pixels on your site. For example, Some places use them for fraud control from hitbots.
For almost everything that looks like spam - there is a legitimate reason for it...
Lets face it, if you and I each have pr7 homepages, and we each put a hidden link to the other's home page off of the bottom of our home page, we are very unlikely to get caught. In fact, the only way that I can see us getting caught is if one of our competitors studies our backward links and goes to each of those pages and checks them out. Then he has to report them, then there is a long delay period for review and action by google (it took 3 months the one time i did it).
