Google.de Spammed

For some keywords (as far as I saw) Google has been clearly spammed

[Kubano]

Hi:
I checked for some days the first positions of Google for the keywords related to the contents of my pages. It's clear that Google has been spammed for people posting in forums hundreds of keywords-links and gaining positions in the first page. Another common practice is to include page results of search engines (Fireball) with the most popular users searches in not dynamic pages. These pages are full with the keywords provided for the sites listed in those pages. Also I saw some sites including lots of hiding keywords and links within homepages very well positioned in Google.
I know that some of these tricks are really old, but I thought Google could keep us away of this.
Somebody has been seeing the same?
Could you see the same for other languages?
Is Google loosing some strength filtering spam results?

[WebGuerrilla]

I know that some of these tricks are really old, but I thought Google could keep us away of this.

The Google PR department is probably going to print this thread and hang it on the wall as a testimonial to the effectiveness of their spam control brain washing campaign.

The only reason you thought they were able to automatically prevent that type of content from showing up is because they've spent a lot of time and money telling you that they can.

The reality is that the majority of spammers in the U.S. that end up getting dumped from the database are removed because of some type of human intervention, not some new, high-tech automated spam terminating cyborg that they developed.

Since the U.S. market generates the most traffic, the humans that are in charge of keeping everything looking nice and clean, tend to focus their time and effort on the most high-profile areas of search activity.

Keeping the most popular search queries as clean possible goes a long way in convincing the general public that spamming doesn't pay. Meanwhile, the spammers who work in foreign markets, or markets that don't show up on the radar screen continue to have succes using the same techniques that worked back in '98.

[internetheaven]

Meanwhile, the spammers who work in foreign markets, or markets that don't show up on the radar screen continue to have succes using the same techniques that worked back in '98.

Shockingly true! We tried pushing our products into the European market and couldn't get a natural top 10 result on Google due to spam. Unfortunately no other free listing search engine is used that much in European countries so everything comes down to Adwords.

I hadn't considered the human review aspect of the US market, here in the UK it is still really bad.