I'm barely qualified to bring up this subject, as SEOmoz has certainly had our fair share of asking a friend to submit something to Digg, give us a boost on Reddit or add a tag at Del.icio.us, but I was pretty surprised to see the level to which social media manipulation has been taken:
Go visit the freebies section at Digitalpoint, and you'll see one of the most active sources of social media manipulation publicly available. The crowds are Digging, Redditing, Del.icio.using and Stumbling every few minutes. The timestamps on the 30 entries I viewed on the front page was less than 30 minutes - more than one post per minute on the topic of trading votes at the social sites (and this is late at night, PST).
Obviously, manipulating social media content, particularly the front page of Digg/Reddit has significant benefits, but to have a popular forum with people abusing the system out in the open like this seems almost bizarre. The sites and people who attempt to game the systems are putting themselves out there where anyone can find them. I wouldn't be surprised to find quality control teams from these sites monitoring those threads to help identifying and defeat spam.
What do you think? Is it OK to trade favors at social media sites? Is it wise to do it in a public forum? Is this a center for abuse, or simply the tip of the iceberg? And, maybe most importantly, how much of the content that gets voted up, thumbs up'd and tagged is organic?
What do you think? Is it OK to trade favors at social media sites? Is it wise to do it in a public forum? Is this a center for abuse, or simply the tip of the iceberg? And, maybe most importantly, how much of the content that gets voted up, thumbs up'd and tagged is organic?
Rand... I'd love to give you my opinion on this, but I'll need a few thumbs up. Anyone willing to give me some thumbs? If you thumbs-up my comments I'll thumb yours? Anyone? :P
Consider it done!
;)
Phew... that was a close one...
I figured that if someone was anal enough to give Rebecca's Simpsons post a thumbs-down, I'd surely have my joke taken out of context and get booed off the SEOmoz stage
Then I'd have to go back to all the other public forums and ask for votes :)
I don't think that it is right to ask for votes, but I also don't agree with blackhat SEO techniques and they have worked well for some businesses (even if it is only for the short term).
Regardless of the system, you'll always have people who try and game it. But this is a good thing for two reasons:
1. it means people think your system is good enough to want to appear popular within it (be it for traffic, links, ego etc.)
2. gives you an opportunity to monitor the usage, learn from the ways people are abusing it and then improve the system as a whole
I'm a thumb-whore. Wait. That sounded wrong...
The moment you incorporate a system to measure performance it's hard not to become addicted to it...
Thumbs, votes, diggs etc. etc.... They're seriously the crack of the social media scene.
Wont be long before they need a Diggers Anonymous
I see a link-bait opportunity here:
Notwithstanding the social aspects of social media (and 12 step programs), Digg (Netscape, Reddit) trading, like most low-effort promotion -- it's easy to moralize, and equally easy to rationalize.
The challenge of course is the marketplace.
Buying links under the radar based on corrupting some innocent blogger: good
Buying links in the open on DP: ?
Clearly this is childish acting-out awaiting the inevitable punishment. That said, it begs assessment of the challenge of the gray...
...it's not black and white.
Looks like I am pretty late to Thumbs-up party .........
It's my personal opinion that if you're needing to beg people in an online forum to digg/stumble your content, you probably need to create better content.
LMAO.. see above..
If someone is kind enough to Digg or StumbleUpon my stuff, I might send out an email to some of my contacts and ask people to vote.
But I have this one simple rule; they ONLY do so IF they like what I've written.
I'd much prefer people be honest and say: "No thanks!" than just vote for the sake of it.
Similarly, I've not voted on stuff people have offered up to me for the same reasons...
Most of the time when a colleague asks me to digg something, I'll digg it if I find it interesting. Most of the SEOs who bug me tend to submit decent stuff, so I typically don't have a problem digging it; however, I probably won't digg stuff that I wouldn't ordinarily digg if I came across it on my own.
Rand, it seems you took your screenshot just before I tried to put a stop to the nonsense with my post about how not to do Digg requests.
The bottom line is that Digg monitors Digital Point and checks referrer details. Hundreds of people got banned about 14 months ago and yet people still insist on promoting stuff there.
In a very real sense, what we're seeing is Darwinism at work on the web!
Those who're not smart enough to do things legitimately simply make things harder for themselves and eventually get kicked off the field of play...
i was going to comment but octane sums it up well.
spam...spam..spam..spam..spam..spam..
p.s. i always just flag the post, blog, digg, thumb vote request (lol), myspace friend request, etc.. as spam or lame and move on.. just like once you read the Google webmaster stuff you agreed to report spam results.. right?
Yeah, maybe I'm naive (no comments from the peanut-gallery) but I need to believe that eventually the crap gets pushed away and the legitimate / relevant / important stuff makes it's way back up to the top.
Jeff.... the same guys are downthumbing the good stuff.
I see a lovely backstabbing possibility: say I see some item at reddit and I recognize the original poster as someone I want to hurt. I pop over to DP and get a bunch of people to mod up the item, saying that I've been retained to help promote it and I'll owe them a favor if they help me out.
I could get an honest person blacklisted that way.
(note: I'm not the "I" I mentioned)
the possibility of sabotaging a competitor on a social media site by participating publicly in a forum like DP's Freebies is actually pretty terrifying - a lot moreso than googlebowling.
with googlebowling, the person doing the deed has to do a considerable amount of work and have a degree of technical expertise to really linkspam a competitor into the ground.
it strikes me that the digg crowd is so violently anti-SEO that they take a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach. if lee odden can get banned from digg when he never even submitted any of his posts, i start getting nervous.
which means that any ill-meaning jackass with an axe to grind could go into DP's forum and start making all kinds of false SMO spam requests, and potentially get their competition canned. scary.
It strikes me as kind of stupid to post your URL on DP right in the open and I'm sure that most people (the smart ones?) who manipulate social media sites don't. They just e-mail 5000 of their closest friends and ask for the Digg.
If I posted in such a thread I'd expect to get banned from whatever service I was trying to game.. or at least have that URL removed.
Hi Carl, I think you're right.
This is surely the social equiv. of link exchange, and thus incurs penalties.
To be avoided like green milk...
It seems to me that the question of "is this wrong?" is misplaced. We could argue about it, but some people will continue to do it, and others won't. A better question is "what are the impacts of doing this?" Anyone in the know want to bite that one?
If the site owners (as motivated by their audience, hopefully) decide they don't like it, they should do something about it: change the ranking algorithms.
This reminds me so much of link trading. The big guys can fight it. And they do a really good job. And they can make you really sorry. So don't test them! But ultimately, as the web out grows their methods, the site owners will have to find ways to deal with this sort of thing more naturally.
Eventually they won't have to monitor the forums looking for link/thumb trade ads. They'll be in ur link tradez, messin with ur rankingz.
Ironically, Rand discusses good Networking tips in the post beneath this. So lets contemplate that for a moment.
As a small business owner, over the years I've joined various Chambers of Commerce in order to leverage their networking. Now unfortunately, I'm shy and inherently not a good social mixer. But I digress, the point is there is some symmetry between the concept of networking and what I consider "Social Engineering".
Why do you bother networking at a SEM conference or at the Chamber of Conference? Chances are it's not strictly for autristic reasons. You're engaging in "Social Engineering" with the goal of increasing your brand awareness and potentially increase actual business. Trade arrangements are very common in these networking situations where you drive customers to one another, with the goal of amicably increasing one another's business. This can be done overtly by hanging up signs, or covertly by just agreeing quietly to funnel business to one another. You've done this because the two businesses agreed there is positive symmetry between their offerings and that it is financially beneficial to do so. Sometimes even competitors will enter informal agreements when an alliance may prove fruitful for both parties.
What I see on Sitepoint is "Networking", two or more businesses mutually agreeing on a beneficial arrangement working towards a common goal.
But is it ethical? If you're a believer in what I call "Search Engine Purity" then no, it's highly unethical. It's sole intention is to game the system and provides no indicator of quality.
If you've given up the idealistic image of true Search Engine neutrality....then you might declare this technique "Greyhat" that is neither ethical nor unethical. It is simply a tool to be leveraged and networking in this manner does not indicate a lack of quality either. I think most will agree that by in large, these Social Media mechanisms are no longer the arbiter of quality, if they ever could lay claim to that title.
By posting requests in an open forum, they most certainly invite the risk of being auto-buried or outright banned from the respective Social Media sites. I understand their desire perfectly well, but it does stand in clear violations of the Terms and Conditions of those respective services and those sites have every right to enforce them. The quality and usefulness of those sites will be harmed as these schemes proliferate and that will be to the detriment of all of us I believe.
Regards,
Mike
(Edit for typos)
This really shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us... it's been played out many times before. Once something has value, perceived or otherwise, a marketplace will open up for it. Once this marketplace gets eliminated, if it is still of value, then an underground market will open up for it, and probably less about returning favors and more for pay.
So does this just illustrate that for all the ground that has been gained, we haven't moved all that far and there are still many who believe traffic is the ultimate goal, targeted or otherwise?
Or does it make you wonder how much of the industry makes up these social networks and are they as diverse as we think? Are the ones willing to swap for attention needing to do so to get past the "in crowds?"
Or are they just average people trying to drive traffic to their sites who have heard that getting attention on these social sites can do that, but aren't as connected online and asking their friends for help just leads to questions like, "What's digg?"
These are meant more as questions than rhetorical statements as I admittedly haven't played much in the space.
Either way, expect to see someone move in to capitalize on the matter, which may bring about the real ethical, moral dilemma... would anyone feel any differently if they were able to pay someone outright to do this and there was no risk of being exposed?
I'm picturing 3rd world boiler rooms with spoofed IP addresses selling diggs for $25/100. Discounts for volume, and repeat customers.
Now that I've thought of it I'm surprised I haven't seen an email shilling it.
Fantastic Idea... Last one to build a Costa Rican Digg spam farm is stuck creating genuinely interesting content.
Social Media is more fun than a room full of Wii's on acid at burning man.
By the way, I'd Digg that if you made a video of it..
But then again, I could see people paying for that kind of service.
I thought the way socially selected news sites "are supposed to work"(tm) is that the "mob" of the Internet is so large that an attempt to significantly (artificially) manipulate results would require more effort than just purchasing advertising?
Everybody asks friends to "Vote" for thier stuff from time to time but doing it in public is a good way to get the target website banned.
If you get 20 of your friends to vote for the content you've recently submitted, it will immediately have 20 - 25 Diggs, give or take (I'm using Digg because it's the most visible and most talked-about). However, if your content is spam, if is sucks or if it's just not all that appealing, it will have 20 votes forever. No one from outside of your group of friends will digg it.
It's very stupid, though, to posts these requests on DP. Maybe these people don't have 20 real friends whom they could email or IM :P
But if you're going to have 20 friends push your stuff, wouldn't it be wise to set yourself up with a group of say, 60 or 70 friends that you randomly rotate through? If not, someone's bound to notice that there's this cabal of 20 who upmod the same stuff all the time.
I can certainly see why nothing I've submitted has ever made it to the front page. Luckily, I've for the most part only submitted stuff that I just happened to find interesting, rather than pushing clients' content.
Then again, I've got a client publishing a big piece over the course of the next few weeks. If anyone here is into stuff like branding and naming, watch for it. Please.
Digital point is not the only one, some program even pay $0.5 per dig or per stumble. People are just willing do anything to get list in first page of those social bookmarks.
I hope they're at least smart enough to pay for super-powerful hosting before they pay for diggs that are bound to send monster traffic their way.
I have my own general ethics question for you folks.
A few of you clearly state that "trading diggs" for instance is unethical.
What about asking your friends to "Digg/Stumble/Spinn" your stories? Does adding the wording "If you liked this story, Digg it!" to the bottom of a post compromise you from an ethics standpoint?
I sense there is a substantial grey area between white/blackhat social engineering. Glancing at the comments I get the sense that some manipulation is "allowable" but the line gets drawn at "trading".
Nearly every SEO/SEM website gets into the mechanics of Social Engineering - but you don't hear them getting called out on it all that much. So where do you folks stand on this? At what point does the site owner cross the ethics line when it comes to Social Media?
Mike
Mike - I get a lot of emails from folks saying - "hey Rand, you should link to this or talk about this on the blog" - many times, those links benefit those individuals or their comapnies/clients. I don't think it's manipulative - just good PR. However, I also get requests like - "if you link to this, I will link to you." Those are spammy and are, in my opinion, lower down on the ethical business scale.
One is asking for your help if you find it valuable, the other is asking you not to consider the value, but ony the benefit you'll receive in exchange. It's not out-and-out evil, and there's certainly a place for it, but it does carry less legitimacy in my opinion than the other kind.
I really can't disagree with that. I think at the end of the day, it comes down to common sense and good judgement.
Such a community is in mixi in Japan.
The members of the community are mutually registering in Yahoo Bookmark and Hatena Bookmark.
I heard that it's good for seo now , but SearchEngine will neglect social bookmarks' links sooner or later.
Social bookmarks might use "no=follow" .
(I'm sorry...I'm not so good at English.)
I'm all for social media, and the "favors" that can be called in at times: "Hey, help me out, sphinn this for me"
But being that open about gaming the medium, that's greed by default.
I know that Digg has removed sites from being allowed on Digg after a big shake-up at digitalpoint.
Even digitalpoint was banned for a while.
The reason why the networks are so popular and are so compelling is because they offer clean, filtered content. It would be a shame to see them lose their sparkle... A lot of the lower tier social networks and Pligg sites are completely overrun with spam.
I think the ethical challenge of viral marketing and using social media is being able to offer up genuine value and interest, and resist the temptation to spam or miscategorize things.
I've certainly asked friends to check out my stories, and I've certainly used the "Friends" feature of social sites and given my friends' stories priority for my attention...
but I hope it doesn't go as far as the spamming of my my old Hotmail account did, and render the system unusable.
Only time will tell.
This is quite obviously unethical.
As has been suggested, it's reasonable to ask friends/supporters to show their support. But trading is manipulation, pure and simple...and it leads to the killing off of system after system. Email marketing was first, then meta tag/keyword spam, link swap mechanisms, web spam (MFA and the like), blog comment spam, and now social media spam.
Whenever something reaches the point where it's systematized, the system is gamed and it begins to lose power.
Some apparently have little in the way of a moral compass when it comes to this stuff. If there's a prayer of making a dollar, they'll do whatever it takes to grab it.
This is sad...because it costs all of us multitudinous opportunities for legitimate marketing efforts at little or no charge. I believe what's going to have to happen in order to make some of these things work is to have human gatekeepers at the door...someone who's paid, but can't be bought. Every thing that leaves out the human factor (as well as many things that retain it) are just too easily manipulated.
This could be the newest and greatest barrier to entry for any new social media start-up.
The best social bookmarking and media companies will continue to spend a large portion of their development budgets to prevent this type of manipulation. Smaller companies lacking the funds to lavish on such projects will fall victim to spammers.
It'd be fascinating to see the techniques they are developing to fight these 'social media manipulators'.
It looks like SEM's have a leg-up at this point - who's to say how long it will last.
Digg and Stumble Upon Exchanges are stupid because it leaves a clear footprint. Free diggs may work though. I decided a few months ago to let my visitors decide whether or not to digg or stumble an article.
Is it OK to trade favors at social media sites?
Is it wise to do it in a public forum?
Is this a center for abuse, or simply the tip of the iceberg?
And, maybe most importantly, how much of the content that gets voted up, thumbs up'd and tagged is organic?
I find digg to be helpful when Blogger's widget in the Google Toolbar doesn't work. CNet allows you to digg their story and it's a cool tool to allow me to blog when the Google Toolbar Blogger post button doesn't work, which is.. ALL THE F***ing time.. hee hee..
Plus Digg has a "LAME" button.. which I tend to make good use of..
This is one of the eternal issues with anything "social". The concept is that your personal connections make a difference.
As long as there are economic values associated there will always be "friends of convenience" -- no matter how well you combat it. Social media manipulation is such a flagrant problem because social media has been so successful. You can now hold a standing of mediocrity just by knowing enough people, and on the Internet knowing someone is pretty subjective.
I find all of that pretty creepy and sleazy... The mods of the forum don't seem to be doing anything about it even though most of the posts seem to break their rules..
Speaking of Digital Point. I used to use their backlink tracking tool occasionally (here: https://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/), and it's been broken for some time now. When trying to look at the charts, there's just a broken image... Anyone else here know anything about that?
Well, in my opinion, this is not really wrong. This like real social life. You can have many friend as you can. You can ask your friend you select you. So if dp exchanging those vote, then is not wrong in anyway. Just depend who is the lucky one on the first pages. :)
it's wrong if that is part of your SEO strategy.
provide unique, relevant content for the keywords you are optimizing for, otherwise you are part of the problem and not the solution...
This is the problem; a lot of people use it as a SEO strategy. They will continue to use it that way until the masses find the next great piece of what they think is the secret sauce formula
It's not exactly accurate, not exactly organic, and not exactly ethical, but who'd be able to resist? Such an easy way to get links and visitors. Sigh.
From a webmasters point og view, I don't really see any problems with it. But from the webmasters of the mentioned sites view, I see that its considered a problem. I'm tempted to say it's unetichal manipulating the results, but than again, itsn't that what SEM/SEO is all about?:)
no it's not unethical..
Please follow the rules or go do PPC...
thnx