Is using twiends.com to get twitter followers considered black hatting?
-
Hi,
I've been struggling to get followers on Google Plus and Twitter, and recently stumbled upon twiends.com.
It offers an easy service that allows you to get twitter followers very quickly. Is this considered black hating? Even if Google doesn't consider the followers as valid, am I likely to be punished if using their service? Even if it doesn't help rankings, it is nice to have lots of followers so that they will see my tweets which has the potential to drive more traffic to my site, and give awareness to my business.
What are your thoughts?
-
At SMX West last month, Duane Forrester from Bing was talking about social signals and Bing, and saying that they look at who you follow as a signal, just like they look at who you link to. You don't want to link to a bunch of spammy sites, and you don't want to follow a bunch of spammy profiles.
I realize that you asked about people following you. Some of the twitter services (though it doesn't look like this is the model of Twiends) for gaining followers follow a bunch of people in hopes of getting people to follow back, then unfollow those who do not follow back. I'm pointing this out here for people in the future reading this and considering other ways to get followers.
Followers don't necessarily read your tweets, much less go to your site. I occasionally tweet from the SEOmoz Twitter account when Jen is unavailable, and there were a couple of times I inserted a bad link into the tweet about that day's blog post. I was amazed at the number of people that I got that immediately retweeted the SEOmoz tweet -- they obviously were not going to the site, but just trying to look like a "real" account by retweeting things from a known and trusted account.
-
Do you get followers that are worth engaging with from this?
I just signed my personal account up and straight away got 10 spam like accounts following me
-
Hi Cameron, I have been using Twiends with great success lately, and I am wondering if there are any other websites with a similar service, or any other websites that are helpful in driving to social network profiles. For those of you who havent heard of Twiends, I would check it out, as I have been getting tons of followers and likes through it. I will shamefully submit my referral link for anyone that because it is considered to be the black SEO.
But if you really wan to increase followers on twitter then please check this link:
I hope that your query had been solved.
-
Hi Cameron,
When struggling over Twitter, +Google or any other social network, I would firstly ask my self if the content of the website is really engaging? Is it really worth sharing it?
If the answer is yes, you most then probably are missing the call to action over the website (just name it and your visitors will follow).
Point out if the article was useful share it with their friends, get something unique over the social networks, make worth it to follow you over there (they get the information faster, there is a community in the background, etc)
As for twiends.com, I've never used it, but it doesn't sound bad (if you list yourself in the right place), but don't forget to place quality before quantity.
I hope this helped gain another view of the problem (even If I couldn't directly help with Twiends.com).
Istvan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why homepage is not getting cached by Google ?
It has been more than 2-3 months that I didn't notice that our website homepage is not getting cached by Google ?? i don't know why?? help me please, thanks in advance. Regards,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | spellblaster
Spel why.PNG0 -
Is Syndicated (Duplicate) Content considered Fresh Content?
Hi all, I've been asking quite a bit of questions lately and sincerely appreciate your feedback. My co-workers & I have been discussing content as an avenue outside of SEO. There is a lot of syndicated content programs/plugins out there (in a lot of cases duplicate) - would this be considered fresh content on an individual domain? An example may clearly show what I'm after: domain1.com is a lawyer in Seattle.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ColeLusby
domain2.com is a lawyer in New York. Both need content on their website relating to being a lawyer for Google to understand what the domain is about. Fresh content is also a factor within Google's algorithm (source: http://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor). Therefore, fresh content is needed on their domain. But what if that content is duplicate, does it still hold the same value? Question: Is fresh content (adding new / updating existing content) still considered "fresh" even if it's duplicate (across multiple domains). Purpose: domain1.com may benefit from a resource for his/her local clientale as the same would domain2.com. And both customers would be reading the "duplicate content" for the first time. Therefore, both lawyers will be seen as an authority & improve their website to rank well. We weren't interested in ranking the individual article and are aware of canonical URLs. We aren't implementing this as a strategy - just as a means to really understand content marketing outside of SEO. Conclusion: IF duplicate content is still considered fresh content on an individual domain, then couldn't duplicate content (that obviously won't rank) still help SEO across a domain? This may sound controversial & I desire an open-ended discussion with linked sources / case studies. This conversation may tie into another Q&A I posted: http://moz.com/community/q/does-duplicate-content-actually-penalize-a-domain. TLDR version: Is duplicate content (same article across multiple domains) considered fresh content on an individual domain? Thanks so much, Cole0 -
Using competitor brand names. How far is too far?
We are a small company competing for traffic in an industry with more or less one other very large brand. I'm noticing we are getting a descent amount of organic traffic for the competitor's brand name however I haven't done any on-page inclusion or link building for the term. We are using their brand as a keyword in our paid campaigns and seeing potential. I firmly believe we have a superior product. I'm tempted to start going after our competitor's brand as a keyword to skim some of their traffic. My question is how far it too far? Do I actively try to obtain a few anchor text specific backlinks? Dare I use their brand name as a term on our page? Maybe just a simple blog post comparing our two products is more appropriate? Any suggestions are appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaliB0 -
Black linking exploitation
Hi all After watching our ranking for some primary keywords drop on Google from page 1 to 20 and then totally off the charts in relatively short period I've recently discovered through moz tools that our website along with other competitor sites are victims to black linking (may have the terminology wrong). Two primary words are anchor linked to our domain (www.solargain.com.au) being sex & b$tch through over 4000 compromised sites - mostly Wordpress - many which are high profile sites. Searching through the source code through half a dozen compromised sites I noticed that competitors are also linked using other derogatory terms, but the patterns indicate batch or clustered processing. The hacker has left some evidence as to whom they are representing as I can see some credible discussion forums which contain negative feedback on one particular supplier also among the links. Although this is pretty good evidence to why our ranking has dropped there are some interesting questions: A) is there any way to rectify the 4000 or so black links, mass removal or other. (Doesn't sound feasible)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mannydog
B) some competitors who dominate organic ranking through better optimization don't seem to be affected or apparently affected as much as our site at least. Which questions how much we are affected as a direct result from this hack.
C) is there action or support for industrial espionage?
D) can you request from google to ignore the inbound links and would they not have a duty of care to do so? I'm fairly new to this ugly side of the Internet and would like to know how to approach recovery and moving forward. Thoughts ideas very welcome. Thanks in advance.0 -
Duplicate content or not? If you're using abstracts from external sources you link to
I was wondering if a page (a blog post, for example) that offers links to external web pages along with abstracts from these pages would be considered duplicate content page and therefore penalized by Google. For example, I have a page that has very little original content (just two or three sentences that summarize or sometimes frame the topic) followed by five references to different external sources. Each reference contains a title, which is a link, and a short abstract, which basically is the first few sentences copied from the page it links to. So, except from a few sentences in the beginning everything is copied from other pages. Such a page would be very helpful for people interested in the topic as the sources it links to had been analyzed before, handpicked and were placed there to enhance user experience. But will this format be considered duplicate or near-duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | romanbond0 -
Potential Implications of using the Disavow tool to remove thousands of links
So here's the situation. My companies site has over 30 thousand backlinks from Rippling.info These links all point to 3 product pages, some of which are no longer in production. Apparently a former employee was experimenting with some link farm ideas. My questions are; 1. does anyone here have experience with rippling.info? Is it legit? It seems like a link farm but Google allows adsense ads??? I thought Google was against link farms... 2. if I use the Disavow tool in Webmaster Tools to tell Google these 30k+ incoming links are to be ignored, will there be any consequences? -Google Analytics shows zero referral traffic since jan 1st 2012.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mjmorse0 -
Is it outside of Google's search quality guidelines to use rel=author on the homepage?
I have recently seen a few competitors using rel=author to markup their homepage. I don't want to follow suit if it is outside of Google's search quality guidelines. But I've seen very little on this topic, so any advice would be helpful. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smilingbunny0 -
What are the best methods of White Hat SEO?
What are the best methods of White Hat SEO? How can you create good quality White Hat links? For example, how do you convince someone to link to your site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | harrygardiner0