I found something new to spam searchengines. (credit to those who invented. Can't mention URLs ) 1. put lot of text in a div and make it visible on hyperlink click (on page load, display:none). So Text wil remain hidden. Google, yahoo and msn are not able to find this and they are taking text. 2. Put a div with negative x and y position and with flash, do redirect after some specific seconds. (this is an old trick but i think it works yet.)
This is all old hat. People have been kicked out of the co-op for this kind of stuff in the past. Wordpress had something like that going and got in a bunch of trouble within the community for doing it. As far as SE's go, I think gone are the days when you can put 70 different keywords (or repeated keywords) in text and actually get rankings because you did it. It may still work for very non competitive terms. I see blatant spam like this occasionally, but it's becoming more and more rare.
Speaking of search engine spamming, would it be considered a form of spamming if I had a link with the same text on 21,700 pages of a site that is a copy of DMOZ? Would this affect google pagerank and SERPS ?
The problem is that the technique can be a legitimate way of presenting data and Google doesn't mind all that much. I have an experiment on my site which shows it working really well. However if you are reported and google does a manual check they will want to see some mechanism for making the hidden text visible and a genuine reason for using the technique. Sarah