Update: As with many flash-in-the-pan ‘buy viagra’ listings, Britney.com is gone and no longer ranks #3.

That’s what the Google search results will have you believe.

You can check out the actual search results here. I doubt they’ll last very long.

The link goes to this page on her site that was created over the weekend.

Who had any idea that Britney was such a savvy affiliate marketer?

If you do a search on Google for Sphinn.com, the indented listing links to a spam post selling Viagra. If you look at the backlinks to this Sphinn page, you will uncover a whole network of spam blogs and comment spam on Digg. Digging a little deeper, if you do a Whois search for a bunch of these splogs, they are all registered to a gentleman named Andrew Bendals in Buenos Aires, although the server (which is blacklisted) is in the UK.

The purpose of this is not to crucify Andrew, as I’m actually more interested in why it’s ranked in Google but not in Yahoo, or MSN (also, why does MSN only show results 1-8, but then page 2 shows 11-20). How did this not trigger red flags in Google almost immediately? Also, why did Sphinn moderators not remove this once they saw it as it’s clearly spam? It seems like a decent sized spam network that probably took some time to put up (unless he has automated the process, in which case it was probably a few clicks) and is actually less spammy than many of the similar spam blog networks I’ve seen. One thing I can’t figure out is where the links back to the Sphinn story actually are located. I’ve searched the source code of the pages where some of the 292 links supposedly originate from and can’t find them. I’m sure some more technically savvy and/or black hats would be able to identify almost instantly how and where the links are coming from, and probably much more about this.