Hhahaha - come on Matt... when Heaven's Gate was doing their search spamming, Larry was posting this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...

It's strange that Page used to care about being a "good net citizen."

You can list the actions he's taken personally to disprove he's not a 'good net citizen', or you can blame Google for not being a 'good net company', but you absolutely are not allowed to speak for what he thinks.

Actually in the US we have freedom of speech, which includes the right to make ridiculous claims about what other people think.

I don't quite get the connection. It seems like you're trying to point out some hypocrisy, but search spamming is bad and identifying your crawler is good.

I think the only thing he wants to say is that this page is older than Google.

Bingo.

Why on earth do you want the maintainer to harm this historic artefact?

Because people can still find any maybe fall for this insanity?

I doubt it. This land mine went off years ago.

Why are you trying to contact them to remove the hidden text?

From his HN bio:

>I'm the head of the webspam team at Google.

It's a joke

A dark one, given that the maintainer in all likelihood was one of the people who committed suicide.

LOL.

maybe to improve their SEO.

Ha ha - we quickly forget how the web USED to be.

Once a few clever souls realised they could increase their visibility by adding hidden words, they started appearing everywhere almost completely ruining any chance you had of finding something you want or need by searching due to all the false positives.

I know this arms race is still ongoing, but it's interesting to see back where we've been.

This kind of hidden text seems trivial to exclude. Does the phrase being searched occur in a parseable sentence? If not, penalize the result. Also, it's trivial to deduce that the text doesn't display; that alone should make it excludable from any and all searches.

"Does the phrase being searched occur in a parseable sentence?"

- that's just an insane thing to suggest, that would exclude much of the world's poetry, lyrics (I'm looking at you Icona Pop), code, etc etc etc. What does it even mean "to parse" in this context.

"it's trivial to deduce that the text doesn't display" - for that example it might be, but in general it's anything but trivial.

I think in some way, Google bot behaves as a headless browser (a la PhantomJS albeit their own special sauce). Their goal is to mimic an actual human user visiting a web page so even JavaScript may be getting parsed/evaluated so dynamically included text may also may get indexed.

In a similar vein, "invisible to user" text may get cross referenced with "visible to bot" text and if there's a discrepancy, that may count against your rank.

I love how Yoda makes it into the list.

I would assume the maintainer evacuated already...

edit: still ranked on the first page of Google for multiple keywords

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Matt_Cutts, what a douche. Surely your algorithm is meant to detect this kind of text spam?

Edit: The website is responsive, clearly got there priorities sorted.

Its not responsive in it current definition. The site is just fluid (based on percentages), the reason some elements seem to realign/behave like responsive design, is because those elements have fixed widths.

History lesson: Fluid widths were quite common until around 2005, as there weren't a large number of resolutions to cater to. Around the start of 2006 designers started switching to 800-960px to have the webpages look the same or nearly the same on every page.

[0] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp - In early 2006 77% of displays were between 800-1024px wide.