In the process of checking the search engine rankings of my site, I’ve encountered sites that are likely tricking the search engines to get a good ranking.  I have not reported these sites to the search engines, but I’m wondering about the experience of others who reported sites that use unfair tactics.

Did the search engines take any action?  How long did it take them to respond to you?  How much information did you need to provide?

I don't want to waste my time or make a false (incorrect) accusation.

i spoke to someone one time about this also - it was said that 9 x out of 10 they will not do anything about it because if you are luckly enough to get in contact with someone it's usually a customer service rep who doesn't really care enough to handle it. But what they did say is the methods of indexing sites and everything else is changing everyday so sooner or later they will catch the person/people who are doing something wrong to get around the search engine.

For example - awhile back if you had a white background - people would hide keywords relevant to their site in the white background with white font and therefore gain ranking from the number of times the keywords are shown. But after awhile search engines figured this out and now when a spider like google goes to your site if they see keywords that match the background color - for example if your background is white and keywords are white - the spider is apperently instructed not to read them or just ignore and skip them.  

So they are taking steps it just takes along time with 4billion webpages on the net and more being added daily

Regards,
Bill