Is keyword stuffing currently causing penalties?

[Marcia]

I was asked to look at a site, and to be honest I've never seen anything quite like the way this is done. I've seen excesses, but never to this extent.

The current webmaster has placed multiple dozens of keywords into the meta tags that are neither on the all-graphics splash entry page or the rest of the site, as well as having practically a page-full of text inside image alt tags and comment tags. It's that way throughout the site.

They'd need to all come out if optimized, but I'm curious whether any of the search engines are currently penalizing for this, or if they're simply ignoring it.

[agerhart]

Marcia,

I know that I have seen multiple sites, some that rank well, that are extremely excessive in their blatant, and easily detectable, spammy techniques.

Does the site in question rank well?

I am sure if the SEs caught this site they would penalize them, but the question is if they have been caught....there are many sites that slip through the cracks.

[Craig_F]

I've been noticing this too. A new site just popped into #2 a google for more than one of my clients important phrases.

I investigated and they did it by sticking 6-8 keywords in *each* image tag. What irritated me is that the images are not related to the keywords at all -- most of them were tiny bullet graphics.

[TallTroll]

My personal favourite is a site I saw recently with 3 separate, similar but not identical keyword tags, each with a slightly different mixture of keyword stuffing