When we went to see The Social Network movie I looked behind us in the theater and saw how as Zuckerberg was obviously double dealing the Winklevie…, people were in awe of his moves, actually wished they had the chance to rip off anyone to get ahead.
At that point I knew that morals and integrity were dead in today’s society…. Well, mostly….
More and more, I am seeing backlash here over what people are doing to get followers and get ahead on Google+. I am hoping to remain not the bashed, or the basher and stay above it all.
Hence, I am not going to point out how many are already trying to game the system here to remain above the bashing. I could name names, that would only make me enemies. Nor am I going to point out how the system can be gamed. That would only result in even more spam and BS games played by the uninformed.
But let’s look at 4 things you should not be doing to get traction on Google+
- Resharing old posts again and again in an effort to artificially raise the number of +1’s, comments and shares on a G+ post, be it your own or someone elses.
- Sharing the same circles over and over thru a ring of users to get more followers, the these Circles of you own creation or the popular user Circle on Circle.us
- Posting viral pictures, MEMEs and animated gifs that have already gone viral in an effort to make a appearance on the Gooogle+ What’s Hot Page or gain traffic thru sharing of proven popular material.
Similarly, I am playing it by the book and clean as I can to not be one bashed. We took Digg by storm in 2008 and got what we wanted, tons of traffic, made lots of money too. But in the end, Digg always caught us and deleted everything we had worked for.
In the end there will be a Google slapdown over copyright, manipulating Google+ search rankings and more
I even had to go so far as to defend Google+ in an interview where another marketer of vastly more reach and authority called Google+ a flat out spam cannon.
My advice all, keep it clean, blackhat will get you very very far, very very fast. But when the Google slapdown comes, and it comes everytime, everything and I mean EVERYTHING goes BYE BYE.
Been thru 9 Google slapdowns since 2003, I even predicted the 2009 Social Bookmarking Spam Slapdown back then. My next prediction? The Google+ Slapdown of 2012. Plain and simple, manipulating Google search rankings be it on Google+ or Google organic search is against the Google TOS Webmaster Guidlines.
In the days of old, Google used to say “Ask yourself this: Would you be doing what you are doing if it was not solely for your own benefit? Then if you had to face one on your competitors and look them in the eye, could you rightly say what you did was not an effort to hurt their business in return?”
Competition and being a brutal businessman is one thing, even gaming the system if cool by me too. But getting caught at blatantly manipulative schemes is another. You make the call, you are the one that will have to pay for it in the end.
