There is a new kind of PPCsweeping the internet as unscrupulous SEO firms, ssocial mediaagencies and internet marketers take advantage of the adoption of social signals for SEO purposes; the pay me to click kind of PPC.
Google released the +1 button back in June to create a social metric comparable to Facebook likes, and announced that web content would be boosted in Googles organic search rankings according to the number of +1s it received.
Of course there are plenty of hungry people out there, so you can now easily find 1000 +1s for $XXX among the many dubious SEO offerings websites are being invited to spend their budget on.
There is no doubt at all that many firms are already buying these kinds of services, usually by proxy. Under-hand SEO operates a bit like mafia hit men – you get your money as long as nothing is traced to me, kapiche? – as shown by the public outing of several large firms that appear to have used dodgy tactics, were found out, and penalised by Google as a result.
But were JC Penney, Overstock.com, Interflora etc paying for black-hat SEO? Or did a competitor set them up? This is very easy to do. Of course nasty SEOs have always been able to try and trash a competitor by doing glaringly obvious black-hat evil on their behalf; but click farms and social metrics like +1 offer new possibilities for the dark side of the SEO force.
Anyone with both the cash to invest and the dubious moral inclination can set up a new kind of sweat shop known as a click farm; a click-farm can be set to work in various ways to either promote a paying customers site or service or to destroy the competition. Using a Click farm you can eat up a competitors Adwords budget in a matter of hours, literally costing them a fortune and lost conversions.
These possibilities are just a few of the ways current systems can be abused through a click farm operator and very bad news for everyone except Google, surely. So why is nothing being done?
Here is the problem. You cant really blame the workers, typically people in developing countries with unimaginably low wages and even less options.
The nature of a click-farm is also hard to guess; it sounds like a factory floor full of workers on PCs, mouse in hand, clicking away at their assigned tasks all day long under the watchful eye of an evil overseer in a very black hat like the well-publicised garment sweatshops operated by the likes of Primark in the far east, except with computers. The reality though is probably very different. A click-farm is more likely to be totally de-centralised, using workers in different geographical areas, perhaps not operating an office or workshop anywhere.
Then theres the small matter of illegality. As bad as these activities sound, none of them are actually illegal. You cant be sent to prison for gaming Google; its not actually fraud.
Surely if Google is silly enough to still rely mainly on backlinks -a metric that can be abused almost as easily as +1s – then they are expecting unscrupulous businesses to spend their SEO budget on dodgy tactics that abuse the system for short-term gain. It could even be that Google arent that bothered; by effectively destroying SEOs reputation over the next few years, dodgy techniques could discredit organic search and in turn ensure that commercial entities turn to other forms of paid advertising.
So remember that when you hear about companies getting front-page results boasting of 5000 +1s, Facebook likes, or re-tweets…
you really cant be sure how they got them.
Gerry Bern August 2011
Taking a break from Tech and writing about the horrors of the UK legal Aid Bill, Gerry has discovered that the nation’s poorest will have no access to justice apart from that provided by no win no fee lawyers. If we have to rely on these shifty legal types for everything from injury compensation claims to divorce proceedings, maybe everyone should get to work setting up some black hat SEO click farms and make some serious money out of this whole foolish mess. It won’t get you taken to court!
I especially love the picture of an Internet sweatshop. I’ve imagined this is what it looks like when we outsource to India or the Phillipines. On a semi-related note, you may be interested in seeing how a BIG name auto dealer group (Larry H. Miller) has been trying to game the “local search” using manipulated reviews. I’ve spoken with several managers there including the EVP, Steve Starks who admitted the practice seemed unethical and committed to end it. However, it’s still ongoing at several of their stores. My blog is at http://www.larryhmilleralert.com.
hope you don’t mind me linking to it…feel free to delete the link if you’d like though.
Not a problem Curtis, I appreciate your honesty. the practice of hiring cheap laborers to click a mouse all day long is not an especially novel one…in my opinion the people that utilize this type of service are 90% of the time ignoring the sweatshop aspect of paying for manipulated “clicks”
Actual people are being exploited by this type of activity. In my mind “click farms” are no less devious than an actual sweatshop where people are forced to weave cheap shirts or pluck chickens all day long. Exploitation is exploitation, no matter how you slice it.
I don’t like that Google+1 now means Google search has mutated into a “social metric” search engine that can be gamed. Website owners can manipulate the social metric by paying for +1 clicksters in India or China or Philippines or buying older unused gmail accts from sellers in forums, etc, and setting up +1′s on these gmail accts. I wonder if Google thought that thru or just wanted to be more Facebook-ish.