How Google plans to Control Black Hat Spam of Google Plus One Button
The Google Plus One button has been the late craze of both the SEO world and the social network marketers. It works wonders! It shares content and it increases your rankings in the search engines according to the quantity (and perhaps, quality) of the +1 of a webpage. Now that we have that established as a fact, a lot of black hatters would naturally come into play. How would Google control the spamming of the Google +1 button?
Lots of people are taking advantage
Warrior forums is even selling +1's like pancakes.
Why not sell a Google +1 service when it works? And that’s just what’s happening right now as many people try to abuse the ability of the +1 button to increase search engine rankings.
Quality as an indicator
One of the ways that Google claims to clean this up is by looking into the quality of +1’s by the relevance of the user who +1’d a page into all his other +1’s – kinda like Facebook’s Like button. The history of a user’s +1 tells a lot about the preferences and (for a lack of a better word) ‘likes’ of that certain user.
Google can see spam activities either by the rate of +1 a user is giving (and the quality of those +1’s) and by the rate a website is getting +1’s. Google can also make the +1 of all the other people in the Circles of that certain user as an indicator of the quality of that user’s +1. Relevance will set the tone for quality – and quality can set the tone for spam indication.
Google is now trying to make the Internet reflect Real-life
Social signals are based on people (and spammers). Twitter re-tweets, Facebook likes and Google +1’s are all action buttons executed by users for anything they want to share. Thus social signals can be a very powerful, user-driven factor usable for search engine rankings. Unfortunately, we live in an imperfect world with imperfect people – namely, black hat spammers.
Search engines are made for People and for Real life
So Google wants their social network to be based on real people and real life too. The result?
No more fake internet identities.
No more pseudonyms.
Google is now pushing for people to register their real names and identities as their Google profile. Perhaps someday soon, Google will even require people to have some sort of facial recognition access (remember, Google bought Pittpatt – a facial recognition company) in order for them to verify control of their user profile.
The advantages of this Identity System
It certainly makes the people who use the +1 button accountable for their actions. It makes them accountable for which page they want to rank higher in the search engines. Real people, real data, real search engine results.
Brilliant!
Except that people are afraid of the internet being accountable – some are even so paranoid as to say that it’s a Google-government tie-up.
The way things are heading: controlling the spamming of +1 means controlling the identification of spammers in the Google realm – no one wants to be identified as the person behind the spamming.
In the end, Google profiles might just be the most accountable database of users the internet will ever see. And as chances may have it, Google might just pull it off.
