Don’t Buy Followers

We recently received this email offer:

Buy Twitter Followers and boost your account’s popularity. First impression is everything and after using our service, it’s hard not to be impressed.

Twitter Followers $.10 per follower
Re Tweets $.15 per retweet

Buy Face book (sic) Likes & Fans. Facebook Likes (Fans) strengthens your online and social credibility. Our techniques are absolutely safe and secure.

Face Book Fans/Likes $.15 per like

Digg is a popular and well-known social website where stories are updated every hour and users vote on the stories they like. If your story gets plenty of votes then it may be featured on the front page of the website.

Google indexes digg (sic) in every hour. Getting some votes on the digg (sic) can be very vital to your online success. You can see a flood of traffic and some good buyers from the site.We can give you Digg Votes from real humans in quick time and at cheaper rates.

Digg Votes $.20 per vote

Buy Google plus Ones and boost on your search engine ranking. If your website has 1000+ Google Plus Ones, your visitors are going to react in a much more positive way to your website. They’ll feel more confident in purchasing a product or service, or even the credibility of your website. With an Increase in Social reputation – You’ll earn more Money.

112 Plus +1 $20
1120 Google +1 $175
224 Plus 1 $40
560 Plus +1 $85

More than just spam

Actually, this was only half of their email; the other half was a verbatim repeat of the above. A sure sign of spam. But worse than this being spam, buying followers, tweets, fans and votes is a very bad idea.

Smackdown!

To the extent Google, Yahoo and Bing use social signals in their ranking algorithm, they rely on them being natural votes in you favor and in favor of your website.If they can tell that you’ve manipulated them, you will get a smack-down that’s not easy to recover. Don’t think that search engines are unaware of these tricks, or that they’re not looking for tell-tale fingerprints that you’ve employed these Black Hat SEO techniques. If you average one new follower or fan per month or one or two +1s or Digg mentions a month and suddenly you get hundreds or thousands — well that’s a red flag to the search engines, isn’t it? A few years ago, websites for Ricoh and BMW were totally banned from Google for more than six months due to black hat manipulation. If big companies like that can get such a penalty, search engines won’t think twice about hitting you with something just as devastating to your website traffic.

Bottom line: don’t do it.