How much time do you think Google employees spend reverse engineering what we do?
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Lets face it, it's the corner stone of SEO, reverse engineering sites to guess at what big G does. It would just make sense they did the same to learn all our tactics.
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Thats what I hear from chatter from the google employees, they are too busy working on new features to look back at how people are exploiting them. I think we'll see a big change in the future now that it got a bunch of press.
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Well, it has been claimed that the spam team has been asleep at the wheel a little bit recently (but then again I hear SEO is dead these days as well) but I'm sure I saw something where Matt Cutts said they're going to be putting more man hours back into fighting spam and if they should have learned anything then I would guess part of their time should be looking for new ways their SERPS are being abused.
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I am sure they have a team that looks into suspicious sites, but I doubt they crawl the web randomly looking at sites. Matt Cuts is a member of SEOmoz, so he should be well informed : )
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None (or very little). If they did SEO research or reverse engineering they would have discovered the issues with sub-domains, affiliate links and content farms - to name just a few - before they ever became an issue. Sometimes I think Google (and others) are reacting to the markets rather than being proactive in their products.
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