Report on Competitor who is keyword stuffing

[jebernier]

I have a competitor who is blatantly stuffing keywords are the bottom of their pages, BELOW, the text nav.

The text color is only one shade darker than the background.

They are ranking high but are NOT practicing good SEO.

Why haven't they been caught by Penguin yet?

Is there anything I can do to alert Google of this practice?

Thx,

JB

[tedster]

Google does accept spam reports from people who are logged into their Webmaster Tools account. The current URL for those reports is [google.com...]

They list several categories of spam there, but I don't see one thats fits what you are seeing - nearly hidden text and keyword stuffing. They also offer a category for "other" so I guess that's where your report would have to go, if you decide to make one.

Why haven't they been caught by Penguin, you ask. It's possible that they are not ranking because of what you see there (which may just be ignored) but because of other factors. Penguin is designed to demote sites that are ranking mostly because of SEO rather than content - and not to stop every kind of spam technique that exists.

[netmeg]

Google doesn't get everyone. They never have and they probably never will.

[Andem]

>> Why haven't they been caught by Penguin yet?

Because Penguin has nothing to do with on-page SEO, nor does it have to do with text on-page. According to many, Penguin is related to inbound links.

As to your question about whether or not Google will penalize a site using hidden text in the footer: Anybody's guess. I suppose it will happen sooner or later.

On that note, I remember a few years ago that government pages hosted by The Republic of Ireland had hidden text at the end of many pages along with paid links. As far as I can remember, they were never penalized.

[Bewenched]

Honestly I don't think they'll do anything even if you report them.

One of our competitors stuffs so many keywords and about every 10th word is a keyword in all of their copy and it really seems that they're being rewarded for having text that's virtually unreadable by humans.