The tactic of "spam piggybacking", or flooding a blog's comments section with links to boost Google ranking, is only the latest attempt by marketers to manipulate search technology for profit. Interestingly enough however, many people who should know better are responsible for perpetuating the problem.

First, a spammer finds a blog owner who doesn't quickly delete spam comments, and posts URL's to the products and services the spammer wants to pitch. Said spammer then spams the original blog URL in other blog comment sections, boosting the Google ranking of all pages involved. By boosting the rank of the non-spam blog, marketers also dodge spam comment blacklists, and at the end of the day gain exposure.

At the heart of the rank manipulation is Google's Pagerank technology, which gives Bloggers a higher ranking, something that has long been a hot-topic of debate even before marketers began to abuse it. Yahoo developer Jeremy Zawodny offered an excellent description of the technology's shortcomings last summer, lamenting that "PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked".

And the problem has only gotten worse since Zawodny's comments last year. As Wired News is exploring this week, Porn outfits are not only flooding blog comment sections with spam, they are creating bogus blogs themselves. With Google's acquisition of Blogger.com, that means Google is suffering from a double whammy, a Google owned company being used to manipulate Google rankings.

And lest you think only absentee or mundane ("today I purchased a new shampoo" or "Brad is dreamy") bloggers are allowing the comment conundrum to continue, security analyst Steve Friedl did an investigation in our forums and came to some interesting conclusions. Friedl statistically broke down which blogs were most responsible for lending the spammers a hand.

Amazingly enough, The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University is one of the worst offenders. Of the weblogs hosted on their server, 99.25% of the more than 9000 comments are spam. "It just boggles my mind that a group so keyed into Internet and Society could let this go on," suggests Friedl. "Does "Internet and Society" only matter if you're being quoted somewhere important?"

Since Steve illuminated the issue, all of the bloggers at CIS have suspended comments. According to Steven Bechtold, the move was done until the bloggers can update their Moveable Type installations "which will hopefully provide a long-term solution to this problem."

Blog owners wondering what they can do to minimize blogger spam would be well served by checking out these tips by programmer Kasia Trapszo. While blogger diligence is required to keep the practice from becoming an epidemic, ultimately Google needs to lobotomize and rebuild their PageRank system to prevent abuse.