How did the Googlebot miss this?

Flagrant SEO abuse

[NickJAllen]

I've just checked one of my competitor's high ranking index pages. It looks fairly empty, but is in fact full of hidden text- multiple keywords etc. I think what they've done is made the background black, and then simply typed in all the keywords in the usual black text.

I'm surprised such old-fashioned dirty tricks can be missed nowadays -how should I go about dealing with this / reporting this?

Do you think it would be fairer to advise them that I've spotted it and tell them to sort it out pronto.

I'm genuinely not sure what is regarded acceptable netiquette here - or should I simply report them.

[Visit Thailand]

This is only mho but there is so much to optimisation, cleaning and validating pages on our own sites, I do not worry about such underhand tactics. They will be found out. So personally I just ignore it and spend all my time and energy optimising legitimately our own sites. Why waste your time on something that could ultimately somehow sometime backfire.

[DaveN]

NickJAllen,

Seen this stuff alot in Google it seems that thier algo isn't picking this at present or if it will ever, it is one of the hardest types of spam to detect by spider alone.....but if you report a site to google and a human looks at it, bang it's gone.

DaveN

[Sinner_G]

Do you think it would be fairer to advise them that I've spotted it and tell them to sort it out pronto.

Don't takae the time to advise them. You are too nice, Nick. Just report them and if you are lucky, they will disappear from the index. If you advise them, either they will just laugh at you and keep on doing their stuff or they will take the invisible text away and try optimising with legitimate methods. In this case they could still be on front of you.

[ukgimp]

Fill this out

[google.com...]

continue on your way. I am sure they would do it to you if they could. Also it is not like they tell em who reported it.

Worry not and be ruthless.

[Mohamed_E]

The Google spam reporting address is:

[google.com...]

[Marcia]

Nick, I'm sure GoogleGuy would tell you to go ahead and report whatever you find. No doubt even if they don't move on a particular site it helps them in the long run to tune their detection process, and they also know who to watch out for.

I have no proof or basis in fact, but I still firmly believe that Google deliberately leaves a certain amount in there for educational and research purposes, because from those that use "creative" methodologies today there's a valuable resource for discovering all the latest and greatest tips & tricks that the greatest minds in SEO will come up in the future.

There's probably not much to gain with keyword stuffing with hidden text anyway, it's more likely to be hidden links. I've seen that used; most of what I've found isn't hidden at all, and it's more to manipulate Page Rank than anything else, in addition to another factor best left unmentioned for obvious reasons.

I've noticed that the really clever ones keep their irrelevant stuff from scrutiny by them *not* ranking well, and those are used to bolster rankings for sites that can hardly be noticed because they're right on topic for the searches they're ranking well for.

There are some that would come down like a house of cards if Google ever did something about Javascript redirects, but no doubt they know about that also, it's so common.

I had one day recently when I was tempted to report an enormous network of clever PR manipulation, but I resisted and just kept it in the bookmark folder I keep those in. It's just interesting to watch, and I suspect that Google already knows about it.

[NickJAllen]

Thanks all. By the way Marcia I've just checked, and there are 2 hidden links too. So I've gone with the general consensus of these pages and reported them.