[thelist] More on Search Engines

[James]

Russ wrote:
[snip]
> Granted, I'm making some semi-educated guesses here, but these guys
> appear to be legitimately beating the system by fooling any relatively
> modern browser into not seeing the copy.  [snip]

File a spam report to Google each time you notice one of these, making sure
"hidden text or links" is ticked, and there's a good chance Google will
remove the page(s) from their index.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Google's TOS page is here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
with perhaps the most important section being:

'Quality Guidelines - Basic principles:

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.  A good rule of
thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a
website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this
help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"'


James