I set out to find a search comprised entirely of spam and was rewarded on only my second try. See a search for casino seo at Google and note that only a WMW thread, an SEOConsultants page and the Linksmile homepage are showing up (at the bottom) as non-spam results. The remainder are ranking primarily on the strength of their domains and the nice blog comments contained within. What's shocking is that MSN, while they do display generally lower quality domains in the results, has actually produced far superior relevancy for this search.

This is good evidence that while Google is doing an OK job filtering its links and penalizes sites, it's not as smart when it comes to filtering spam content on quality sites. It's almost enough to make one feel sorry for successful bloggers - but, remember, only the blogger themselves can stop blog spam.