Fact: Earth revolves around the sun.
Another fact: your business needs a social media presence.
It does not matter whether you run a local bakery or a national company. Social media is an essential piece of your business marketing strategy. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social platforms help you connect with your customers, increase awareness about your brand and boost your sales. With more than three billion people populating the earth, using social media is no passing trend.
Whether you are a new entrepreneur or experienced businessman, consider using Black Hat Engine Optimization.
What is Black Hat Social Media?
In the search marketing world, “black hat SEO” refers to techniques and tactics that increase search engine ranking in ways that fall outside of the search terms of service or engines’ guidelines. In other words, black hat social media is an attempt to utilize a social media site for some kind of gain, using methods that are outside the social media website’s guidelines.
Examples of Black Hat Social Media
To help you understand what black hat social media is, here as some examples.
- Buying followers, Likes, YouTube Subscribers, +1, etc. from click farms
- Using a program to automatically follow and unfollow new accounts
- Creating fake social media profiles to like, share, comment or gather information
- Writing fake negative reviews on competitors’ page or positive reviews on your own
- Securing social profiles with competitors’ names, ranking them in Google, and posting negative comments
These are just a few examples of black hat social media. In reality, there are so many ways you can use social media to positively or negatively impact a business that is outside of the social site’s intended purpose.
Influence marketing is steadily on the rise, with Instagram as one of several leading platforms, according to Eminent SEO a design and digital marketing agency. If you have a certain number of followers in a niche, brands will pay or sponsor you – making social media an even more attractive source of revenue for aspiring ‘influencers.”
The Google effect
Black hat social media can really impact SEO
Buying fake followers, likes, and shares. According to Eminent SEO, social signals are emerging as ranking factors as search engines determine how to leverage social media interaction and behavior. most SEO professionals believe that social signals have some impact on SEO, even if they are not a direct ranking factor.
For example, if a person were to buy likes, tweets, and shares to fake an interaction with content, this could falsely inflate the content’s level of authority, especially if the profile listing this social interaction is public and crawlable by Google.
Optimizing fake accounts
According to Eminent SEO, when people create fake accounts, they have the ability to operate under a different name. for instance, if you create a fake account with a competitor’s name and optimize it, this fake account may rank for the competitor’s name. users will see that profile in Google search.
If the fake about you created outranks any of the competitor’s real web properties, that can hurt them by impinging on their click share. Or, if what is displayed in the search listings deters the user, that could hurt the overall brand reputation.
Fake reviews
For better or worse, the black hat social media also implies leaving fake negative comments, and they just stick. If negative reviews rant well, they can really hurt the business.
Moreover, reviews that contain the appropriately structured data markup can display as a rich snippet in a search result – and users seeing a low start count for a business may decide to take their business elsewhere. But on the bright side, there is no proof that negative reviews impact SEO.
Poor quality social sites
If you get a link from the wrong website it can become a major issue. This raises a question: could a share from the wrong social media website hurt your SEO?
Links are generally gauged based on the domain authority, topical relevance, etc. So, if you have thousands of shares from spammy, off-topic social media profiles, that could potentially hurt your rankings.
What can you do about it?
Each social media sites is unique and each situation where black hat social media may hurt SEO is also unique. while it is to true, there are some tools you can use to fight black social media.
Mark things as Spam
Almost all social media sites have the ability to mark things as spam.
contact legal. most social media sites have an area to contact the company’s legal department; this can be effective if you have a legitimate claim.
Report Spam on Google
If something should get ranked in Google, you can also use the webspam reporting form on Google.
Blackhat social media is out there and it is hard to deny that there is no way it can hurt SEO. This piece is meant to open up the conversation, not necessarily by a comprehensive guide or study, especially in this realm with so many question makers.