Big thread on Matt Cutts blog today about Search Engine Spam.  A site called The People’s Cube said some nasty things about Google after their site got dropped from Google’s index recently.

According to Matt:

My answer to The People’s Cube is to make sure that all the hidden text/links are gone, and then do a reinclusion request. And don’t think I didn’t notice the cross-linking with sites such as gqw.us and sitexpress.net and che-mart.com that still have text/links hidden via CSS. Those sites should be cleaned up as well. I don’t know why thepeoplescube.com was hiding links to sites like buyonlywithus.com, which still has hidden text via CSS that says

Now, I don’t know all the ins and outs of Search Spam, hidden CSS Spam, so it’s interesting for me to read the large number of comments to Matt Cutt’s blog on this topic.

Some of the more interesting responses to me were:

Looks like you answered my question – Google has no problem finding CSS spam.   seo2seo

I wonder, did thePeoplesCube people get a webmaster warning email about the error of their ways back on the fifth before their traffic got socked and they lost their revenue stream for the next N months? If so, this would be an excellent time to highlight it and show how Google is following up on that program. John Andrews

The only thing I would want to point out with what Matt/Google found is that if you take a hard look at some of the major markets for real estate, you will find a lot more than that.

Everything from hidden links/text, dummy sites set up talking about widgets but hide these real estate rich keywords in the sites CSS files and use hidden links pointing back to the main real estate site. IMO if Google wants to find spam, look no further than in major real estate markets and several of the top ranking sites.  Spam in major real estate markets is as bad as the porn industry. Nice catch but it would be nice to see all get treated equally.  Wayne 

There’s so much spam going on that I ran into a totally unrelated case today; once of my clients is getting a Yahoo Dir sponsered listing – the listing is not more than 24 hours old but just leaving off one letter of the url string brought me to a spam site presented it’s self as my clients’ site – but it wasen’t – it was a spammers site and it used the same tagging my client used the day before.