Is using Mechanical Turk to increase our number of Google +1's Black Hat?
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Or will it affect our ranking positively or negatively at all?
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And it's not allowed by Mechanical Turk, either.
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies
<a name="#violation_examples">What are some specific examples of HITs that violate Amazon Mechanical Turk policies? [excerpted]</a>
- HITs that directly or indirectly promote a site, service, or opinion
- HITs that violate the terms and conditions of an activity or website (for instance asking Workers to vote for something)
- HITs that generate "referred" site visits or click-through traffic
- HITs that ask Workers to take action to manipulate a website's behavior or results
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Black hat in my book....be interested to hear how you get on if you do try this strategy though.
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Um, short answer... yes. A darker shade of gray.
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Better to produce great content on the site so that people +1 you naturally.... If the site isn't up to scratch then you won't get many conversions anyway.
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If black hat is defined as using techniques to fool the search engines, then yes. If not, it's at least grey.
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