Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Does Google and Other Search Engine crawl meta tags if we call it using react .js ?
We have a site which is having only one url and all other pages are its components. not different pages. Whichever pages we click it will open show that with react .js . Meta title and meta description also will change accordingly. Will it be good or bad for SEO for using this "react .js" ? Website: http://www.mantistechnologies.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobinJA0 -
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
My website is coming up under a proxy server "HideMyAss.com." How do I stop this from happening?
We've noticed that when we search our web copy in Google the first result is under a proxy server "HideMyAss.com," and our actual website is no where in sight. We've called Google and they really didn't have an answer for us (well the 2-3 people) we spoke with. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AAC_Adam0 -
Benefit of using 410 gone over 404 ??
It seems like it takes Google Webmaster Tools to forever realize that some pages, well, are just gone. Truth is, the 30k plus pages in 404 errors, were due to a big site URL architecture change. I wonder, is there any benefit of using 410 GONE as a temporary measure to speed things up for this case? Or, when would you use a 410 gone? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Using an auto directory submission
Has anyone used easysubmits.com and what's your experience with it? Any other directory submission or link building tools that help automate and manage the process like easysubmits.com says they can do? I'm just looking at it currenlty and wanted to hear others thoughts before I get taken in by some black hat method that hurts my websites instead.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Twinbytes0 -
DropBox.com High PA & DA?
"What’s up with these dl.dropbox.com High PA & DA links?" You know, It's frustrating to spend almost an entire day getting a few great link backs... then to find out your competitor has hundreds of cheap & easy link backs for the keyword you are going for with greater Authority [according to SEOmoz's OSE]. So I ran a search on one of our top competitors in Open Site Explorer to gather an idea of where the heck they are getting all of their links. Please feel free to copy my actions so you can see what I see. Run a search in OSE for www[dot]webstaurantstore[dot]com. Click on the ‘Anchor Text’ Tab. Click on the first Anchor Text Term, which should be ‘restaurant supplies’ :: Then it will expand, click on the ‘View more links and details in the inbound links section.’ As you scroll down the list you will notice that they have a bunch of linking pages from dl.dropbox.com, all of them are .pdb files, for their targeted Anchor Text, restaurant supplies. Q: So my question is can someone please elaborate on what .pdb files are and how they are getting this to work for them so well? Also you will notice, on the expanded Anchor Text Page, that their 6<sup>th</sup> most powerful link for this phrase (restaurant supplies) seems to be linked straight from a porn site, I thought Google does not rank adult sites like this? Q: For future reference, does anyone know legitimate websites to maybe file an SEO manipulation complaint? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Burkett.com0