How do website owners gain from facebook scams like this?
-
I've noticed two things that are going wild on Facebook this week:
and
In the first scenario, you supposedly just click share and they'll send you a $25 Tim Horton's gift card. (For those who don't know Tim's it is a very popular coffee shop in Canada). There's no way this is happening...they claim to have something like 5000 cards to give away.
In the second one they're apparently giving away 1000 ipods.
Yeah...OK.
So, they're obviously scams that are just trying to get a few zillion facebook shares. But why?
-
Thanks Sha, but I still don't get it. What's the benefit of having ten thousand social mentions on a domain that will never get used for anything else? Or do they eventually build something else on that domain and then create a backlink to one of their sites?
-
The reason is fairly obvious...gaming search engines with social mentions.
This will never go away because there will always be masses of people out there who will think "what have I got to lose?". People recognize that if it's a scam all they lost was a click and if it isn't they'll get something for nothing.
The general public has no idea that a share is "worth" anything for a website and values a click at zero.
Sucks to be them if someone sees it and decides to let the engines know what is going on though eh?
Sha
-
Yeah I see a tonne of this stuff but to be honest I just always use my better judgement and assume it as a scam, closing the window. However, you're quite right... not all web users are used to seeing this stuff and having that reaction, therefore there is bound to be some people that through no fault of their own are naive enough to fall for the scam and end up getting screwed over in some way or another.
I guess there must be something in it for the people who do it though, or they wouldn't continue doing it... sort of like the emails I get from Nigeria asking for my bank details... some people must give them or they'd have stopped by now. Such a shame, but in time with the younger generations being so internet savi I assume it'll die out, or at least I hope so.
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
-
Hi guys, I need to create a subscribe end-off to my YouTube videos. I need something like this - https://www.youtube.com/user/SeattleCoffeeGear - where the red gear at the bottom pops up with a bright red "subscribe" CTA. How do I do this?
Hi guys, I need to create a subscribe end-off to my YouTube videos. I need something like this - https://www.youtube.com/user/SeattleCoffeeGear - where the red gear at the bottom pops up with a bright red "subscribe" CTA. How do I do this?
Social Media | | Bev.Aquaspresso0 -
Is there a Facebook Ad equivalent to Google MCC?
Hi Mozzers, Really unsure if we are missing something here, but whilst trying to set-up paid ads for some of our clients on FB we have run into a significant issue. We need to be able to allow FB to debit multiple business accounts for varying ads on different pages. However every time we try to access the ads manager to set-up a new ad, FB takes us to the individuals (the person logged in to the page) account, rather than creating an ad account for that page/business individually. What are we missing? We use Google MCC for managing our PPC campaigns and so wondered if there is anything similar we can use for FB? Or any other recommendations on how to get round this without dragging each client into the office and asking them to log-in so that we can set these up? Thanks!
Social Media | | Silkstream1 -
Blog posts copied to Facebook or Linked? Any Duplicate Content Issues?
I wasnt able to find any good answers on this. I have two separate ecommerce websites, one with a top level blog. (www.xyz.com/blog) and different website with a subdomain blog (blog.xyz.com)***note on the subdomain blog, although it links to our website. You cannot directly shop from it. Until i can make some sort of scraper, its what I have to work with. For quite some time now I have been copying the blog posts and re-creating them on facebook as a Note. Using the same anchor text/links on facebook as my blog post. Part of the issue is that I want the facebook pages to have some content and not just links. Both get 2-3 updates per week, 1 of those being a blog re-post. Does anyone know if google or bing considers this duplicate content? Should I simply link directly to the blog everytime, as a best practice? Any insight on this would be great. Thanks!
Social Media | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Content marketing for fake snow website
Hi there I have taken control of a webshop that sells fake snow and winter effects products. www.snowsupermarket.co.uk I am going to start a blog & in addition to paid and organic search practices, what other content marketing ideas does anyone think could increase traffic. Cheers, Ben
Social Media | | SnowFX0 -
Will we penalized for using social media contests to gain fans/followers in the future?
To help build up my company's website, we've been making a huge push in social media and to gain followers on our social pages, we've recently been running a couple of contests. So far it's been a great success - more traffic to the social media pages and more traffic to the website. We are considering making the contests a regular part of our social media & SEO strategy. In the past, our social media strategy has relied completely on "organic" likes (no incentives to follow our company's page) and posted content articles, pictures, etc. In the past month or so, we've began to use giveaway contests as a way to gain followers. Since focusing more on running contests, we've seen a huge increase in actively on our social media pages. We've continued to regularly post content articles, interesting pictures, etc, during the contests, but haven't see the same level of engagement that we do with the contest posts. Right now, it's looking like there is no down-side to running the contests as we're seeing an increase in traffic on the social pages, getting some additional traffic to posts and on our site, but before we start to completely commit to this strategy, I have a couple of questions: Is there a reason we shouldn't continue to run these contest to increase fans and interaction? How likely is it that Google will penalize us in the future for gaining followers through contests (instead of "organic" followers that followed us without an incentive)? There are some fans/followers that are serial contest entrants and are always entering a contest - could having too many of these fans raise a red flag for Google and the other search engines? How often is too often to be running a social media contest? Basically, I want to make sure that we are using social media as a long term SEO tool and are setting ourselves up to be successful in the future and not get penalized for gaining followers the wrong way. Any tips, strategies or advice is very much appreciated. Thank you!
Social Media | | airnwater0 -
Best Joomla Facebook LIke Box Plugin
Hello, We want a like box that shows up like the one attached. We've tried several plugins for Joomla 1.6 and none show up consistently in all browsers. Which one do you recommend? like-box-for-seomoz-question.gif
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
Should I post these viral videos/photos on my website?
I started posting viral videos and stuff that I found on reddit and youtube on my facebook fan page. It's getting a lot of attention and creating more opportunities for bonding with my fans/customers. I'm just wondering what you guys think about reposting some of this stuff on my blog...do you think it would be worth the time and effort? I've experimented with a few and it really does draw traffic to my site...and gets me facebook shares. But the traffic is very poorly converting. So, now I'm trying to decide if the extra time it takes (i.e. 5-10 minutes to write a blog post and include the video imbed code vs. 20 seconds to just hit the "share" button) is worth it. What do you think?
Social Media | | MarieHaynes0 -
Buying Facebook Likes
It's quite easy to buy Facebook likes & fans these days. You can get 200 for five bucks at fiverr. I am sure that most of the likes are from fake accounts. But do you think it will have any affect anyway? And is this black hat SEO or is it just collateral from trying to boost the # likes / fans?
Social Media | | Chrisper0