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Trade of Google+1 "Likes" as a Business
siliconbits writes "Selling Google+1 "likes" is gradually becoming a rather lucrative business, helped by cheap labour and ever-falling internet access worldwide; the trend is not unlike what we saw previously with Twitter & Digg during the days except that this has a more widespread implication for SEO and could turn the nascent social networking service into a massive headache for Google as many try to game the system. Google+1 selling sites like Googleplus1supply, buygoogleplus1 or Blackcatseo have cropped up during the last few months — amongst so many other websites — with the sole aim of selling Google+1 "likes" to publishers and businesses."
ever-falling internet access worldwide
falling??
The only thing that Google+ is saying about their +1 affecting search ranking is that it will only increase the ranking of sites that people in your circles have +1'd.. so unless you plan on following a bunch of spam bots on Google+ I really don't see how this is an issue..
"+1 helps people discover relevant content—a website, a Google search result, or an ad—from the people they already know and trust"
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1140194
Or even better - actually pay one of the services for +1s relating to some fake/obscure unlikable thing, and ban every user that +1s it.
This is why "crowdsourcing" consistently fails as a method of business ranking. It's too easy to spam. Google was burned by this late last year when they were counting reviews on Citysearch and Yelp. That backfired badly. Local search results were polluted with junk entries. Google got a lot of bad press over this. Since then, they've stopped counting "likes" on competing sites, but they still count their own.
Google's ad customers have been complaining local spam for years,, and Google hasn't been able to fix it. It's become worse since Google combined local results with web search results, and the value of local spam went up.
It's a good thing they're forcing people to use real names in order to prevent abuse of the system!
...wait, you mean it's _not_ stopping people determined to exploit the system or make a nuisance of themselves, it's just harming the people interested in maintaining a long term presence on G+? Say it ain't so!
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It's pretty easy to see where this is going, though, and these companies are only thinking ahead.
Google quantifies you somehow. Person A and Person B aren't friends, but they both read a lot of /. and constantly search for tentacle porn. If Person A clicks on a link involving Natalie Portman and an over-excited tentacle monster, it might display that result with more importance for Person B.
Just make it so the site only shows the likes/dislikes of people who are in your circles. Trust networks are a proven, decade-old concept.
Which was already the plan. The point of these businesses is to sell to ignorant marketing departments... not to thwart the might GOOG.
Kind of like how most of the money in spamming is in selling spamming services to wannabes, not selling what is in the emails.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Meta-moderation worked on /. too, why not for Google? It should be trivial to easily identify such "services" by their likes being quickly metamoderated into the ground, hence rendering all their "likes" worthless. Of course, this again can be gamed, but with enough layers of moderation, meta-moderation and meta-meta-moderation, it should become rather tricky for such "services" to continue their business against the rest of the internet users.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Don't ban them, just don't count their +1s until the behavior of the account gives sufficient evidence that it is legit. The humans who erroneously get flagged as possible bots wouldn't even know it and there would be no adverse impact on them. Since there is no ban, it's not as clear to the SEOs what it was that tipped Google off.
Let's see... you're posting advertising on a page for geeks and nerds who have an innate hatred for people who try to abuse "their" system and who are also well known for their zeal to protect their turf and prefer meaningful search results to bullshit advertising in them. In other words, you're talking to the people who will most likely hate you with a passion and who also happen to know a fair lot about the technology you use.
So I wonder, do you want a free audit, are you trying to find out how resilient your service is to a DDoS or are you posting the name of your competitor to have it shut down for free?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Selling Google+1 "likes" is gradually becoming a rather lucrative business, helped by cheap labour and ever-falling internet access worldwide; the trend is not unlike what we saw previously with Twitter & Digg during the days except that this has a more widespread implication for SEO and could turn the nascent social networking service into a massive headache for Google as many try to game the system.
That rumbling you hear is a million deceased writing teachers digging out of their graves to make siliconbits diagram that "sentence."
hey look, i'm standing on your lawn with hundreds of millions of other global millennials and we cherish the thought of forcing you to accept our grammar and "incorrect" forms of activism for the rest of your fragile and worthless existence. Lulz.
Might happen, but I wouldn't bet my life savings on it. For every permanent addition to the language, there's a fad that dies the death when its time is up.
"Groovy" was a cool, popular word during the flower power era. *No-one* uses it now, except as a tongue-in-cheek invocation of the era it's inexorably tied to.
More recent example- remember 13375p34k? Pretty common a few years back. When was the last time you heard anyone use it seriously, or even tongue-in-cheek?
As for "FAIL", the way it's generally used self-consciously by bandwagon jumpers smacks of a fad. I think "LOL" will be around longer because it's common and used as instinctively as inhaling air by every mouth-breathing cretin out there.
Ironically, though it's a variant of the latter, "Lulz" is more self-conscious, more subculturey, less mainstream, and IMHO more likely to be representative of an era. It's likely to be dismissed by Anonymous' younger siblings when the former grow up and the latter take their place and want their own subcultural words.
My guess is that if you're using "FAIL" and "Lulz" in 20 years time, you'll be seen as a sad, boring out-of-touch guy living in the past.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"Google+1 selling sites [...] have cropped up during the last few months"
Hard to believe given that Google+ did not exist one month ago...
Funny not only can you turn off the instant search, it is even off by default, which means you or someone who uses your phone turned it on.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Like without dislike bothers me.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest