Web Counter Spam and Google Manipulation

I usually don't do SEO posts. I certainly don't out sites for spamming. But this is getting out of hand and I'll confess to a little bit of sour grapes up front.

I only noticed this because this site consistently ranks #1-3 for any keyword it wants. So my natural curiosity played a role here and in the space of about 10 minutes I found out that this site is spamming Google by using link counters to get inbound links from sites. This would violate Google TOS on a variety of levels, you'd think. It's an obvious scheme to get a higher Page Rank by forcing people to link to your site. You'd think Google, with all its power, could at least find these links and diminish their value as they are known to do to sites that are known link buyers and sellers. But alas, not the case. I know this has been reported many times to Google in the past year, yet nothing is done.

So here we go. Enjoy how it easy it is, too. Get ready to buy your own counter domain and buy Google Adwords to promote it! Here are a site's links (all from the front page of a link: command on Google):

Not wanting to out the site entirely, I've done (poorly) hidden the domain that the counters link to. The bottom one actually links the counter to the site with the alt text of the keywords in the top 3 examples.

 Need EDU links? This site gets them this way. Need some GOV links? This site gets them this way. It's a brilliant scheme, to be honest. And this isn't the only site using counter spam to influence Google's SERPs.

Why is this going un-noticed? That's the question.