Earning $$ by fooling Google?

Filed in archive Spam on February 13, 2007

I remember times, some years ago, when people with little morals and a big urge for a high page rank and keyword search position included white on white (yellow on yellow, black on black and so on) text full of keywords to their websites, technique known as keyword spam.

This kind of behavior was almost instantly marked as unfair and Google began to penalize it, together with those sites containing nothing but links and other mock-websites. We were all told that people resorting to such techniques of 'search engine optimization' will soon have no profit by behaving so, but were we told the truth? Spam Investigator from Spam Attack Blog doubts it, and provides some proofs, showing a website with huge amount of hidden text, operated the same way since 2004:

"Try searching Google with any of the keywords included in that hidden-text content and you will notice that the website is always included in the result page (either 1st page or 2nd page of the results). Even the actual content of the page visible to normal users is not related to the searched keywords, that page will still be included in the search result because of the keyword SPAM.
Now, many will say that it is just a matter of time before Google notice it and ban the website. "Just a matter of time" might be too long and anyone doing this might have already earned a lot of money before Google take action and ban the website!"

This is an effective way of showing that Google is not almighty, or simply that lot does not care as much for providing the most relevant search results as we thought.