Spammy Backlinks, Bought Followers & Your Brand

While it doesn’t get any better than poking fun at companies using spammy backlinks to boost their rankings, there’s something even more gratifying about catching them in the act buying followers or likes for their social media profiles.

But social fakery can be a lot harder to spot than spammy backlinks, so this week we’ll take a look at a few tips you can use to see if your competitors are playing the numbers game when it comes to social media.

• Head to their Facebook timeline and click on the ‘Likes’ tab box. You’ll be sent to a page showing a graph of how many new likes per week the page has been getting over the past month. Seeing a dramatic spike in ‘likes’ is likely the result of bought likes.
• Take a look at the demographic breakdown of the Page Insights as well. If it’s an Australian business that caters to seniors but is most popular in Eastern Europe among teens then you can safely make the assumption they’ve bought links from a foreign seller.
• Think they’ve bought Twitter followers? Check what percentage of their followers are fake, inactive or legitimate with StatusPeople’s new Fake Follower Check. While a couple percent of fake followers can be attributable to Twitter’s spam issues, any more than 10% and you’re looking at bought followers. A huge percentage of inactive followers can also mean bought followers.
• Pull up their Twitter follower stats on Twitter Counter and look for any consistent patterns in follower increase. If their Twitter follower count is increasing by the exact same amount of new follows every day then you’ve most likely got a case of bought followers. Or their fanbase is incredibly coordinated.

Know of any companies using shady ways to build their social cred? Name and shame in the comments below!

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.