Social Media black hat methods - can google see this?

[Llanero]

My site was hit by a Penguin or Panda, for some bad linking in 2012. Ever since then I have been 100%  completely white hat, being careful who I pick to my marketing. Once burnt....

Recently, with all the hype of social media being the thing to help you boast rankings, it got me wondering about how Google really can monitor this.

I saw this the other day on Elance...

I need 5000 Facebook fans. They must be real looking and be coming from US IPs, Preferable real looking US accounts.

If people are just going to get false Facebook fans, tweets etc.... then it is no better than all the bad linking.  Perhaps Google will come out with Puma penalty (well we have pandas and penguins)

[Raydon]

This is typical of businesses who often run terrible business practices, and offer bad customer support in reality, thus gaining few fans, who then will run out patience with the organic process despite paying for it, and are duped into this by some random spam or call or salesperson who calls themselves social media "guru" and thus you see surprising number of fans for that one terrible business you know and always wonder wth!

I sure hope this never gets into search result ranking factors and that twitter and facebook do something effective against it, it is just going to make a lot of value generation from social media so much harder and more expensive (promoted posts etc).

[Llanero]

Thanks - very clear

What social media does help ranking?

[MikeRoberts]

As Takeshi said, there really is no benefit of doing that with respects to SEO. But some people are desperate, ill-informed and willing to try anything.

[TakeshiYoung]

Facebook does not have a direct impact on rankings on Google. Facebook can have a small impact on rankings in Bing, but only for your friends.

Getting 5000 fake Facebook fans will not boost your SEO in anyway. Having a large number of fans can provide a bit of social proof and might help you get more fans, but will have zero impact on Panda, Penguin, or SEO.

[Llanero]

I wasn't planning on doing this. I was curious as so many people are offering these fake fans and I couldn't see the benefit

[MikeRoberts]

I don't see Google caring about fake facebook fans as it does nothing for people or their sites. 5000 fake facebook fans will make you look bigger than you are but those 5000 aren't necessarily liking and sharing your content, they won't broaden you shared stories unless what you want is more bots liking your page, and it'll increase the costs of your promoted posts without any ROI since you'd be promoting to fake people anyway.

Facebook has been known to occasionally hit pages doing this and remove fake accounts used to inflate page fans.