Is Google not Penalizing aggressively anymore for on page manipulation?
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I wanted to throw this out where we have been seeing so much emphasis on Google cracking down on bad linking, have they let up enforcement on manipulative on-page tactics that have faded in current years? I've been seeing hidden text popping up again and ranking. Here is an example. Google "landscaping Portsmouth NH" and find the #1 result. Now find "Portsmouth" on the page. So what I find interesting, the site has a clean backilnk profile, but that's a pretty blatant manipulation hiding those keywords.
What I find interesting is I filled out a report on it a year ago. (I'm not a big "fill out spam report" guy, I was curious if Google would take action). A year later it is still #1 for the competitive keyword. So I'm curious if others have seemed similar trends like font-size:0px, or text color as the background popping back up and ranking.
I would love other's thoughts on it.
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I would be very surprised that the hidden text is actually working, and I would think that google is just ignoring it and other factors are making it rank. Something like font size = 0 or same colour as the background, would be so easily picked up by a bot/algorithm compared to some complex things it can pickup on.
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I didn't think Google still let anything like this though any more? I have tweeted Matt Cutts with this and a link to this post as I hate to see anything like that myself.
-Andy
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