There’s a great blog post (and subsequent comment discussion) happening over on the SEOMoz Blog today. The topic is one that all SEOs and webmasters have encountered at some point in time:

Why, oh why, has the Google God not smited my competitor who engages in obvious blackhat SEO practices?!?!

Google has been pretty aggressive about asking webmasters to report this evil behavior, and a few years ago were reasonably efficient at dealing out punishments. Unfortunately, the industry in general has noticed that Google’s Web Spam Team (not a deity after all) has not been taking action on these complaints anywhere near as often nowadays.

Frustrating to all us whitehat-ers? Absolutely. But it most likely isn’t indicative of Google having stopped caring, or in anyway condoning those practices as some have suggested.

Rand Fishkin goes through several potential reasons/causes behind this trend – all of which make a good deal of sense. Check out the post, it’s well worth a read. We have to wonder though, spammers have been around since the beginning of teh interwebs – no matter what fix Google implements, won’t there just be a wave of human ingenuity poured into finding a way to beat the system? Is web spam ever a problem that can truly be solved? We’d love to hear your thoughts…