The Dark Side of Social Media Optimization
August 30th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Grayhat SEO, SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Rand came out with a kick ass post on Social Media Optimization for those of you who lean a little more towards the dark side, here are some things to think about.
One of the most common uses for this type of behavior is for reputation management and parasite SEO. One thing to be aware of is you can very often get a double listing to appear. If you’re not careful or have done some advanced planning it’s pretty easy for a competitor to do some “virtual drafting” and appear directly behind or underneath you. Another point to notice it takes a lot more work for you to get that first listing than it does for the second guy to grab onto your coat tails.
Maybe you’ve gone through MySpace and built an excellent list of actual relevant non-sock puppet friends. Well what are you doing to prevent your friends list from being scraped? Almost all of the bot programs for myspace come equipped with a friend scraping feature. You do all the work they get almost as much value with much less effort.
Got yourself or your company a great profile in wikipedia? Are you fully prepared for a criticism section? If someone can create a less than favorable “body of work” externally, and if they are articulate and careful enough they can insert some nuetral point of view criticisms citing that critical mass of negative work. The goal here isn’t to make them switch to another company, just to put enough doubt into their minds that they may not be making the right decision and not purchase from you. It’s especially helpful if the profile making those criticism’s has a history of doing good things, like deleting spam and removing vandalism (of course lots of wikipedians won’t ever consider you created that spam and vandalism with another disposable sock puppet account to make yourself look good).
Trying to get more out of Yahoo Answers, again running sock puppet accounts to ask questions you have the perfect answer for is so easy everyone thinks of it. Using sock puppets to “rig” the voting and get your answers voted the best is slightly more sophisticated. How about using RSS to “stalk” some keywords or phrases, giving you laser targeting on your question, answering and voting methods.
Looking to goose up those bloglines subscription numbers, why not set up some catch-all email addresses on some domains you’ve killed, create bloglines accounts, subscribe at will, lather rinse repeat.
Somewhere on Digg, newsvine, and almost every other user generated content site out there is some policy about “not submitting your own stories, websites or blog postings”. Well I see those kind of things kind of like handicaps in sports, they make the rest of kids think they can run with the big dogs, and just don’t apply to me. So what if I happen to be mildly schizophrenic, and have lots of imaginary friends who are very net savvy? Are you going to discriminate against the people who are reality challenged?
Web 2.0 opens up a whole new game for those creative enough to use to use it. For heavens sake delete your cookies and use proxy servers
Sphere It
August 30th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
What do you recommend for using proxy servers? There’s a bunch of options. Any in particular that work well in your opinion?
August 31st, 2006 at 2:09 am
private ones
You may want to look at TOR - but be warned it can be dog slow. Of course running an automated tool through TOR will be less of a strain on your patience than doing it yourself…
August 31st, 2006 at 11:28 am
I’ve only seen a few sites that sniff your cookies (haha) to see if you have voted or dugg. I think the ip session is more used so proxys would be more benefit. Unfortunately I dont know any to use.
September 1st, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Come now… a quick google serach returns over 15M for “open proxy server list”, with the first result you are one click away from a list of ‘active open servers’.
September 22nd, 2006 at 1:01 pm
Very nice read.
December 12th, 2006 at 4:32 pm
What does being social have to do with this?
March 4th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Very interesting (even if I don’t interesting the title
thanks !
March 8th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Good tip.
June 21st, 2007 at 5:31 am
All about the matter of increasing traffic on site.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:31 am
Nice Article! Here I found something useful regarding social media optimization. Take a look at that
http://seomization.blogspot.com/2007/10/social-media-optimization-marketing.htm