Spamming Social Media

Recently I received an email from a company that was offering to help push and promote my site in the search engines, specifically Google. The email was very straight forward with the opening of “You should be on the FIRST page of Google”. Then it went into detail explaining how in order to do that you need backlinks to your site, and how their service can help.

While having backlinks (links from other web sites to your site or social media) are valid as a way to promote your site, it was the packages that they offered that left me scratching my head. Their “Bookmarking” package offered “400 social bookmarking backlinks from different websites”, and the “Blog Comments” package offered “We will deliver 5,000-15,000 blog comments with anchor text.” Every package they offered had obscene numbers next to it, that in a normal business world just isn’t possible without spamming these outlets in an effort to try to manipulate the search engines.

So with the red flag raised, I decided to do a little digging into this company. I came up with some very interesting information: The company is in Jaipur India. It is also one that has a notorious reputation as an ad farm, meaning that they own hundreds of web sites that do nothing but display ad pages, in most cases nothing but Google ads, in an attempt to make money. They have over 750 FaceBook pages registered, and have over 100 employees that do nothing all day but click Like buttons, add links into Wiki pages, and post useless comments on Blogs.

While companies like Google, FaceBook, and WordPress are working hard to combat this type type of practice, the fact remains that these companies are working full tilt to make as much money as possible doing these type of things before the plug gets pulled.

If you look at the steps taken so far, like the change over by FaceBook to the Timeline, which started with the business pages, it is a huge leap forward with not forcing people to click the “Like” button on a splash pages in order to see what is posted. Google with the cleaning process of removing these ad only sites from their index, and WordPress tightening the leash on known post spammers to stop the comments from getting posted. This is all being done in an effort to make the web and social media a better place for the end users.

So what does this mean to the business owners? In a nut shell, it comes down to making your content as rich and informative as possible for your potential clients, and keeping it updated and fresh. It means that when you tag keywords, or post to social media, it should be relevant to your content, and lastly, it means that your website should be compliant and search engine friendly. This is the most effective way to not only get on the first page of of the search engines for searches related to your business, but also to help you stay there.

If you need help in accomplishing this, please feel free to contact me. I have over 14 years of experience in designing and building web sites, and helping companies build and define their message. It is the dawn of the new era of the internet, is your business ready to embrace it and grow?