Is Google blind to spammy tricks?

[sleidia]

Hi,

Since quite a long time ago, I've noticed that several of my competitors' websites use tricks like hidden content mixed with keyword stuffing and, months after months, they remain in the top search results.

What is Google doing?

It really makes me laugh when I read about Google penalties here and there because such a thing doesn't seem to exist at all in fact.

Well, sorry for this rant-like post that is pretty useless in the end.

[DanAbbamont]

I reported one of my competitors for some big misleading colorful text over an ad unit about a week or so ago and that ad unit no longer exists.

An AdSense ad unit? That's defrauding advertisers and essentially stealing money. It's not the same as gaming search results.

You have to look at this from Google's perspective. When you file a spam complaint, a human being has to go check it out and decide if they're going to manually deindex that site. That costs Google money. The only benefit Google gets from this is that maybe a small fraction of users see one less irrelevant site. Definitely not enough benefit to warrant the cost of paying the guy who had to handle the report.

So you see, they don't want to deal with spam reports. It just costs them money without making any noticeable improvement on SERP quality across the board.

Now on the other hand, an algorithmic change that targets spamdexing methods is actually a good investment. When one of these is rolled out, SERP quality across the board is improved, which helps with user retention which helps with ad sales, which makes the investors happy.

And for the record, modern blackhat isn't easy. Aside from a few people who are extremely advanced, most blackhatters are pretty much grunts who just aren't smart enough to create quality sites and attract links naturally. When I was into blackhat years ago it was all about using your brain to really take SERPs over in no time. For a while I was working maybe 2-3 hours a month and getting hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Now it's people slaving away all day and night generating enough crappy content and crappy links to rank for some low competition terms.

[Lame_Wolf]

For a while I was working maybe 2-3 hours a month and getting hundreds of thousands of hits a day.

Hits are not visitors. One visitor can create 100's if not, 1000's of hits.

[DanAbbamont]

OK, hundreds of thousands of visitors then. None of them navigated any site owned by me anyway, just forwarded directly to whatever program I was using to monetize at the time.

[koan]

Now it's people slaving away all day and night generating enough crappy content and crappy links to rank for some low competition terms.

But this part warms my heart :)

[almighty monkey]

Oh look, a thread of people complaining about blackhat SEO. I haven't seen one of these in, ooh, hours.

Blackhat works. People who do blackhat make money. It's not our jobs to make Google, a multi-billion dollar conglomorate involved in increasingly anti-competitive and invasive business practices, life easier.

Deal with it. Or get out of SEO. Go pay £5/click on Adwords or something.

Now it's people slaving away all day and night generating enough crappy content and crappy links to rank for some low competition terms

'But, but, but my crappy website that took 2 days to set up is generating $1.50/month completely hands free! Free Money! I'm an internet MARKETING WARRIOR BUCKING ALL THE SYSTEMS OF THE WORLD ITS LIKE A FREE CHOCOLATE BAR EVERY MONTH YEAH RTARRARGGGHHH!'

The communities for people who run those places really are the worst.

edit; Dyslexia + Energy Drinks = Tragedies commited against the english language.