The majority of these tactics strike me as sleazy, but they almost exclusively work because search engines don't realize they're being gamed. And as search eng

The majority of these tactics strike me as sleazy, but they almost exclusively work because search engines don't realize they're being gamed. And as search engines get better at recognizing these tactics (e.g. font size of 0), they stop working. The big search engines in 2019 are generally smart enough to ignore this stuff. What concerns me more is when the search engines themselves are complicit in anti-user tactics. One example is the loosening of restrictions, particularly by Google, around cloaking. Google used to come down very hard on cloaking, where you show different content to a search engine's bot than you do to a visitor who arrives from a search engine. The reason it used to disallow cloaking is because users hate it. Nobody wants to see a search result that appears to answer their query, only to find out when they arrive on the page that the content is inaccessible unless they pay for an expensive membership to the site. But now Google indexes subscription and paywalled content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/paywalled-content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/paywall... and tries to make it seem like this isn't cloaking, but from a user's perspective, it totally is.