Geektronica is reporting on the increased sophistication of spam blogs.

Second, spammers are becoming less obvious by creating posts that link to actual news articles (complete with excerpts); by all appearances, these blogs are just like scores of real blogs. But if you look at the code of the page, there are tons of external spam links, cleverly hidden by CSS. Here is an example: Mario’s News Archive Posts (to which I’m avoiding giving Google-props by using the rel=â€?nofollowâ€? attribute). With this additional layer of subterfuge, it’s remotely possible that someone will even link to “Mario’sâ€? blog from their highly-ranked site. Check it out – it’s quite slick. It even auto-reloads every few seconds (though I’m not sure why).

Distinguishing this sort of spam from a real blog looks pretty tough, regardless of whether it’s a person or a machine trying to make the decision.

Related posts:

1. Blog comment spam magnet
2. UMBC blog research on splogs in Baltimore Sun
3. Blog spam considered dangerous
4. Spam in Blogs and Social Media
5. links for 2007-03-27