If you are involved in SEO, especially if you are working on the "dark side" of the business, this post from Matt Cutts might interest you.

It sounds like Google is going to start notifying webmasters when their Web sites are getting penalized by Google for breaking the webmaster guidelines. Of course, this is only when the site looks legit - not if the page is an obvious spam factory.

And speaking of spam factories, Matt also shows us a page that is so badly optimized that I think it tripped ALL of the Google spam filters.

Here is the list of tactics the page uses from the Mighty Cutts himself:

• keyword-stuffing


• deliberately including misspellings


• nonsense or gibberish text, probably auto-generated by a program


• you might be able to guess from the left-hand side and all the variants of "tax deferred" that there are many other pages like this. You'd be right: the site has thousands of doorway pages.


• the site owner attempted to gather links by programmatically spamming other sites. Specifically, the site owner found a vulnerable software package on the web that doesn't yet support the nofollow attribute for untrusted links, and then spammed several good sites trying to get links.


• this site is also cloaking. Search engines get the static page loaded with keywords that you see. Users get a completely different page.


• the pages returned to users employ sneaky redirects. Users get a small page with a JavaScript redirect and also a meta refresh; each page just does a redirect to the root page of this domain.

Hilarious stuff. Whoever made this page was so "black hat" in their SEO they might have a black hole on their head.

[Thanks to the Black Hole Encyclopedia for the pic]