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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."
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
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.
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.