Google pays a high price for popularity, with cybercrooks seeing it as a perfect tool to spread malicious messages and links over the web. Google Hot Trends, for example, is being employed by criminals in creating links affiliated with trending search terms on different websites, which redirects to their malicious sites.

Google's PageRank algorithm considers links as additional points for search results ranking. Although website owners hire SEO specialists to boost their rank on Google, some are just too hasty to climb notches higher by using malicious links. These links allow huge traffic because of the popularity of the search terms.

Google  has been having problems with link spam and PageRank exploit for quite some time. It has superseded rival engines Yahoo and MSN, now known as Bing, in terms of market share. However, it has become a magnet to spammers and scammers over the years. Indeed, popularity has many snares, but it has proven to be unrewarding for some.