Search engine spammers never prosper. Sooner or later, they get caught. And when they do, it’s almost never pretty. Consequences can include ranking penalties, removal of the site’s “voting” power (i.e., ability to pass PageRank), incomplete indexation (i.e., a partial site ban), or, worst of all, getting “graybarred” (i.e., a total site ban, when the PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar is grayed out). You can’t exactly just pick up the phone and give Sergey or Larry a call with a “Mea Culpa” and then everything magically comes right again. It could take years for a business to recover from a site ban.