Spam watchers say Google’s Blogger hosting service has become infested with “splogs,” fake blogs aimed at tricking search engines to artificially increase page ranks of certain websites while also loading up surfers’ computers with adware and spam-generating Trojans.
"Page rank is under attack, and the attackers are winning," said Dave Winer of Scripting News. "It won't be long before Google itself is infested. It's time for Google to get on top of this. They're both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in page rank."
Spam blogs have spread at an astronomical rate thanks to automation software and tools offered by blogspot that allow sploggers to automatically populate the bogus blogs with keyword-optimized posts and Google AdSense advertisements.
The posts often feature the names of popular search terms and prominent bloggers such as Arianna Huffington in order to boost their visibility in searches at RSS aggregators like Feedster, PubSub and Bloglines.
Blog tracking site Technorati estimates that nearly 40,000 splogs have been created during the past week alone. FightSplog, a site that exists solely to monitor Blogger activity, says one splogger is responsible for creating more than 2,700 porn-related splogs.
On Tuesday, Google released a statement regarding the problem and published a list of deleted subdomains — but critics say that won’t be enough to stop the spread of splogs, and the company must act fast if it wants to avoid a backlash.
For example, Blog search service IceRocket has temporarily stopped indexing new Blogger posts. While IceRocket said it will resume indexing Blogger once the site adjusts its filters, it openly warned that it will bar Blogger postings permanently if Google doesn’t find a fix for the splog problem.