Google has passed 10 years , in the early days people were using hidden texts against bots. 10 years passed and what do you expect ? Two of my rivals have began using hidden text -first one is using it at the bottom in a table cell , the exact color of the background - second one is using it in a complex form using a good use of onmouseover and guess what I have lost my no 1 ranking against them , one of them also stole my title and description. I generally don't complain but this time I used google spam report several times , the normal one , the one inside the sitemaps.And after ten days they are still there. The dark side has won.Thanks to google.
Most of the time sites that do this will get ranked high then disappear. Just keep working on your site and you will wind up on top again.
yeah, but you are not a peak of the world, so you should understand it is not easy to maintains so huge amount of data, collected in 10 years.
Google's response to issues like this has been incredibly poor recently, even set against their historically poor standards. Right now, Google seems to be pouring all their resources into some major change, whether to the PR system or to the algorithm, and has been largely ignoring like these that affect real webmasters. One of my competitors creates a single pixel image that matches the background of the page, and links it to their home page, using the ALT text to increase their rankings. I haven't reported them - I want to be able to beat their asses using white-hat, ethical techniques. I blogged about Google's crappy customer support: http://www.googlewatchdog.info/2007/09/google-customer-support-for-webmasters.html One of these days, Google will notice my little blog and start taking my advice to heart and really working to help webmasters work within the Google guidelines to level the playing field (heavy sarcasm alert for the sarcastically challenged).
Well actually my point is not they are still ranking on top , I know the volume and I know that I am not the only one. But if you are a ten years old search engine these simple tricks should not work , ok the using onmouseover is a good tecnique but what about hidden text in a table cell , just the exact colour of the background. Google has began to consider more about details (too much details) but they are missing the main points while working on them.
What comes around goes around. Just keep working on improving your site and it'll pay off. Google seems to be pitting a lot of their resources to improving their serps and punishing those that they view as cheating.
I think with the current fluctuations I would not worry at present. They will drop out if they have something as easy to detect as hidden text. Maybe onpage is not receiving much attention from big G and they are playing with external site factors. Fine tuning is occuring.
I am looking at this point , it should be simple for a search engine to catch hidden text after ten years , If it could not maybe we should think that we are over-estimating google.( I talking about hosting on multible c ip hosts etc)
Just wait they will sooner disappear. It's not easy for google to read all the spam report because of huge amount of report.