Social Media black hat methods - can google see this?
-
My site was hit by a Penguin or Panda, for some bad linking in 2012. Ever since then I have been 100% completely white hat, being careful who I pick to my marketing. Once burnt....
Recently, with all the hype of social media being the thing to help you boast rankings, it got me wondering about how Google really can monitor this.
I saw this the other day on Elance...
I need 5000 Facebook fans. They must be real looking and be coming from US IPs, Preferable real looking US accounts.
If people are just going to get false Facebook fans, tweets etc.... then it is no better than all the bad linking. Perhaps Google will come out with Puma penalty (well we have pandas and penguins)
-
This is typical of businesses who often run terrible business practices, and offer bad customer support in reality, thus gaining few fans, who then will run out patience with the organic process despite paying for it, and are duped into this by some random spam or call or salesperson who calls themselves social media "guru" and thus you see surprising number of fans for that one terrible business you know and always wonder wth!
I sure hope this never gets into search result ranking factors and that twitter and facebook do something effective against it, it is just going to make a lot of value generation from social media so much harder and more expensive (promoted posts etc).
-
Thanks - very clear
What social media does help ranking?
-
As Takeshi said, there really is no benefit of doing that with respects to SEO. But some people are desperate, ill-informed and willing to try anything.
-
Facebook does not have a direct impact on rankings on Google. Facebook can have a small impact on rankings in Bing, but only for your friends.
Getting 5000 fake Facebook fans will not boost your SEO in anyway. Having a large number of fans can provide a bit of social proof and might help you get more fans, but will have zero impact on Panda, Penguin, or SEO.
-
I wasn't planning on doing this. I was curious as so many people are offering these fake fans and I couldn't see the benefit
-
I don't see Google caring about fake facebook fans as it does nothing for people or their sites. 5000 fake facebook fans will make you look bigger than you are but those 5000 aren't necessarily liking and sharing your content, they won't broaden you shared stories unless what you want is more bots liking your page, and it'll increase the costs of your promoted posts without any ROI since you'd be promoting to fake people anyway.
Facebook has been known to occasionally hit pages doing this and remove fake accounts used to inflate page fans.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google AdWords Class Action Settlement?
Has anyone received and responded to a notice of class action settlement from Google Adwords? The sender (and the website it directs to) is adwordsclassaction.com. I see that there was such a thing, I am just not sure whether that domain is the official one to respond to?
Paid Search Marketing | | Linda-Vassily0 -
Will google consider it as one click for adwords?
Hi All, Many times I want to check actual page of competitors they are targeting in google adwords. Like when I search for any keywords and my competitors page comes on top ads in google, then I copy url from search result and paste in any other browser will it be consider as click and google will charge to my competitor? Example url - https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?------------------------------------------------------------------------&adurl= Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | pragnesh96390 -
Google Account verification requires phone number - too many clients!
Hello, all! I like to create a Google Account for my smaller clients, so that I can associate Analytics, AdWords, GMB, etc. all with the same account. Problem: I've used my phone number too many times, so I can't get the new account verified. I've also used all three of the other phones in our family. 🙂 I tried using the "Burner" iPhone app to create a new number, but apparently the all-knowing Google even has info on phone numbers, as it returned "This phone number cannot be used for verification." I'm sure that there's an obvious solution out there - who among you has found it, and is willing to share?! 🙂
Paid Search Marketing | | measurableROI0 -
Google Adwords
Hi, Is there any tool that tells you if a domain has paid results in Google? I need to find out if a certain domain is showing in the paid search results for any keyword. I tried to from the question clear enough, I don't know how to explain it better.
Paid Search Marketing | | cvissi0 -
Variations of keywords in Google Adwords
Hello. Is it worth running ads for both of the following keywords in Google Adwords (phrase match for both)? 1. "keyword one" 2. "keyword one nyc" If I don't run the second keyword, my ad will still be triggered by a search for "keyword one nyc." So is there a benefit to running both? By the way, the Google Adwords campaign is limited in geography to the NYC metropolitan area. Thank you!
Paid Search Marketing | | nyc-seo0 -
Adwords Product Listing Ads & Google Analytics mis-reporting
I hope you're sitting comfortably, this could be a long one and loaded with questions! Cut to the chase: Why is traffic from google product ads showing as 'organic' traffic in GA? Here's the scenario: Google Shopping I have thousands of products in a feed to google shopping (froogle, google base, google merchant, whatever you like to call it, I'll settle for google shopping for the purpose of this question). The URLs of this feed is tagged with GA tracking data (notably utm_source=GoogleBase&utm_medium=Product-Search), I have also tagged this with internal tracking which comes through in the back-end to assign orders to that specific source. In this case 'GOOGLEBASE'. Adwords Product Listing Ads As you know, a new (ish) feature of adwords pulls in your products from google shopping so that you get a richer ad (image, title, price) and displays this in the 'advert section' of the SERP. Once setting up a few of these, I noticed I was getting a fair amount of traffic for these new ads, taking one example, which resided in a relatively specific ad group (advertising Aviation Snips). Naturally, I wanted to find out which keywords were driving that traffic in order to improve the ads, or kill them if they weren't working. What was interesting is that I can't find anything about that traffic anywhere in adwords or google analytics. 254 clicks to 'aviation snips' must show up somewhere in analytics, if not the keywords, then what about the product? Analytics is showing nothing like that quantity of visits to those product landing pages where you'd expect. It's like ghost traffic. Google Analytics Since experimenting with product listing ads the organic traffic in GA has suddenly shot up, looking at the new keywords they are all queries which when I test them show up product listing ads in the SERP so it's obviously the paid listing ads driving this traffic. Why is google reporting these as organic, rather than paid? I also noticed a keyword appear as * in the PAID segment of analytics. I thought this was my missing aviation snips traffic, but digging into the landing pages for the * keyword, they are many different ones. There's a connection between the * and product listing ads, but what is it? Is the traffic being doubly reported? Back End Meanwhile we've seen an increase for orders tagged in the back-end of GOOGLEBASE which makes sense - google are pulling in my google shopping feed into the paid part of the SERPs and these are generating sales. Here are some of my initial thoughts / theories: 1. When google pulls in google shopping results into the organic part of the SERP, these get reported as ORGANIC in google analytics, even if you've tagged them otherwise. It seems they strip the tags out. This makes it very difficult to know if your google shopping feed is working well, or if you are doing well on standard organic traffic. 2. Google isn't separating out traffic as PAID with their new product listing ads, completely skewing the reports. It makes it look like you've gained great natural organic listings when if fact you are paying. 3. With relation to the missing Aviation Snips data - maybe google is showing a huge variety of products for that adgroup (even though it's specific) and therefore I can't see the traffic to the specific products that you'd expect. This I'm most confused about and wondered if I've missed a trick in setting the product listing ads up? I've attached a couple of screenshots which I hope will help clarify some of this. I can see product listing ads being great if you could get proper data to analyse and improve them. So here are my questions again if anyone can help? How do I see which keywords are driving the product listing ads? How do I see the landing pages for the product listings ads? What is the * keyword coming through in GA? How can you get GA to report product listing ads as paid rather than organic? Thank you so much. If I can gather enough data on this all and work it out I'll try to write up in a blog post to help others. 0rOMM.png GUAE0.png fWPL7.png
Paid Search Marketing | | ewanr0 -
Facebook PPC. Using Google URL Builder - Now What?
Hey There! So I've been trying some FB PPC ads. I recently learned I needed to use Google's URL builder to add the appropriate tracking fields into the URL (source, campaign, etc). The FB ad link now uses a custom URL with all the correct parameters. Now what do I do in analytics? Do I create a filter? A goal? Getting a little dizzy going in circles with google analytic help, and I'm hoping someone here can direct me. Thanks! -Dan
Paid Search Marketing | | evolvingSEO0