Rand got me all excited with his post. I've been tracking down the French vertical of "web design / website design" theme of keywords for the last 12 months. This vertical is very similar to the English one. As an example, if you wanted to score well for Web Design in English on Google.com, you would try to hit, in the long term, the best keywords, like:

Web design
Website design
Web site design
etc. (+ mispelled, plural, etc.)

For French, we have the same kind of situation... You would have to hit keywords like:

Conception site
Conception web
Conception site web
Conception site internet
etc. (+ mispelled, plural, etc.)

I've been looking at the results for quite a while, and I was a little bit surprised to see how many SERPs manipulation I've seen in the top20 for most of those keywords... Here's some examples:

#1 result for "Conception site internet" (and #1 on most other keywords too): www.groupe-media.com. The homepage source is a black hat dream page. I've never seen a page so jammed with suspicious manipulation! To top it off, the company have multiple 100% duplicated sites (like: www.inexmedia.com) on which they rank for other keywords... Identical design, same spamming, different keywords.

#11 & #18 results for "Conception site internet" (and ranked well for most other keywords too): www.conceptiondesiteinternet.com is a doorway page linking to www.click-zone.com. And guess what? Look at this:

www.click-zone.com/Fr/Realisation-de-site-Web.asp
www.click-zone.com/Fr/Creation-de-site-Web.asp
www.click-zone.com/Fr/Conception-de-site-web.asp
www.click-zone.com/Fr/Creation-de-site-Internet.asp
www.click-zone.com/Fr/Conception-de-site-web.asp

What's wrong? The EXACT same content (layout is slightly different, they offer different layouts of their site), the same keyword stuffing, and yet Google ranks all of the 5 pages and index them well.

#13: www.reptiletech.com/ConceptionSiteInternet.html. Nice design, nice layout... but WAIT!!! why are you redirecting me after 7 seconds? Is it because you wanted to cheat the spiders so you can wait until they finish downloading the page before doing the redirection? Strangely enough, you get redirected to http://www.reptiletech.com/html/accueil.php?lang=fr. Another dirty trick to fool the search engine spiders.

This was just my 2 cents to show that Google has increased it's control over spamming, but it is still easy to fool them. I've aware of 3 different companies / seo consultants who filled a complaint about www.groupe-media.com of the SERPs in the past 6 months about its spamming and manipulation of Google SERPs and have seen no action / changes from Google.