CNET reports on a sudden flurry of blog spam activity, apparently due to one clever and obnoxious spammer. It's not email spam, comment spam, or trackback spam, but thousands and thousands of blogs created on Blogspot with links to the spammer's sites embedded in text snagged from popular blogs.

It's pretty annoying, not to mention depressing, what with the apparently eternal arms race we're locked into here. But the most surprising thing in the article to me was that Google doesn't seem to do any serious account verification on its Blogspot service (or didn't until last week). It's not like captchas are top secret advanced technology -- pretty much everyone uses them now. Where was Google?

The other thing I don't quite get is: why did all these crap blogs create so much trouble? I mean, it's the nature of the web that there's all kinds of crap out there -- some spammer adding more crap sites shouldn't make it appreciably worse. This isn't like spam mail or comment spam, where someone is shoving their message into your inbox. The problem here seems to have come from the fact that the spammer cleverly made all his fake blogs highly appealing to search engines. They started to appear in people's search results and RSS feeds (why? do people have RSS feeds of open searches?), and that caused the problem.

So, why? You know, if people had been doing that search on Google, I don't think they would have gotten all those crap results, because Google takes into account reputation (in terms of incoming links) in its results rankings -- crap spam sites that are only linked to by other crap spam sites shouldn't get a reputation boost. So to Technorati and PubSub and so on: do what Google does. Not that Google is infallible (see above about captcha), but these blog search engines are talking about blocking Blogspot from their results. Which will work precisely as long as spammers don't crack other blog hosting sites. Anyway, this is probably going to get worse before it gets better.