Do search engines still monitor sites that cheat

I follow the rules but why should i?

[ezyid]

Hello all,
Two of my compeditors are currently doing very risky techniques to get higher in the ranks.
And you know what?
its working!

one of my compeditors has about 40 websites all hosted on free servers pointing to his website,
wilst the other i just found has a large amount of hidden text at the bottom of his page.

What should i do?
Join em? or as these sites have been up for years the filters will catch me instead?

or should i keep doing the honest thing wilst loosing out to the guys at the top.

Or can i report them..
good use that will do.. they dont listen to us!

Im getting rather annoyed as one of the websites has no Seo skills at all and he is way up above me.

Some ideas please.....

[arran]

For the hidden text, there's no harm in reporting it (although most of these reports tend to be ignored)

[google.com ]

[add.yahoo.com ]

For MSN, click "help us improve" at the foot of the results.

For the artificial inbounds, start a link campaign. I'm sure you'll be able to find 40 crappy sites that will link to you (or even better, 10 decent sites).

Or alternatively:

Don't worry about it, keep writing good content - you'll eventually get above them and stay there.