My competition is using 1px images and links without anchor text. Good or bad idea?

[technota]

I've been scoping out some of my competition and I noticed the number 1 ranking site is doing a lot of "interesting" stuff.  I saw a bunch of 1px blank images that they must be using for the alt tag keywords.  I also noticed several links to internal pages with different keywords without anchor text so they don't actually appear on the page.  Is this considered black hat?  Should I be doing something similar?  It feels like the work I'm doing to try to rank #1 with a clean/professional looking site are wasted when the #1 sites are doing things like this.

[ChristopherGlaeser]

What is the best method to report spam to Google and Bing?

[AlanMosley]

Good on you, some guy the other day on bing forum, wasted an hour of my time trying to work out why he could not get in bing serps, then i noticed over 1,000 keywords in the noframes tag, I was very pissed off, he must of know what his problem was, so i took an extra 5 minutes to report him.

[technota]

Absolutely.  I don't mind losing out to hard work but when I'm going up against cheaters I have no problem blowing the whistle.  Google was easy and has a Chrome extension as well.  Bing, I had to search for a link to email support and I had to provide my name/email which I think is annoying and probably deters people...but I did it anyway.

[AlanMosley]

Did you report to Bing and Google?

Many complain but few actualy bother to report spam

[technota]

Sounds good.  I figured I shouldn't do the same but wanted to confirm.  I didn't realize how easy it was to report spam so that's done.  Thanks.

[EGOL]

I would not use 1x1 pixels to give links or anchor text.  That could get you in trouble with search engines for trying to hide something.

I honestly doubt that this is helping your competitor and is certainly more risky than helpful.

Just stay the course on improving your site.  You will beat them when Google thinks you deserve it... or when Google drops them for trying to hide links.

[AlanMosley]

You should not do the same, but report the spam to both google and bing.