Fake Spamming by SEOs?
There has been a theory floating around for a long time: Google hates SEOs. That is just one article from Bruce Clay former writer Lisa Barone, referencing something from Jill Whalen. Matt Cutts responded with what we all know: Google doesn’t hate SEOs, just the bad ones that give us all bad names. It’s like lawyers … yes I just went there.
But now there seems to be a trend (and it could be because I live in my little hole called SEO) recently where good SEOs are being suspended on Social Media sites.
Case #1: Jill Whalen (@jillwhalen) was suspended on Twitter on September 22 at about 1pm CDT and reinstated a few hours later. No reason, nothing. Community support and twitter contacts helped.
Case #2: Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) has been suspended as of September 22 at 3:34pm London time and not yet reinstated was reinstated later that day. A twitter search for rishil shows the large amount of support for his reinstatement. Update: We got the story of why, written up by SEOptimise.
Case #3: My own Yahoo! Answers account has been suspended for “spammy” activity. None of which has ever happened. I have appealed three times, and gotten nothing. Yahoo seems to just not want to hear it. So my efforts to remove spam on Answers, and my support of that site are all for nothing. I am still not sure if I will ever return.
So what is the deal here? Are we being identified and purged no matter what? Yes, this is taking three small cases and making a HUGE assumption. But why are these accounts being marked and taken down? All have been in good standing and done nothing wrong.
Anyone else seen this happen? I’ll update as I learn more.
2 
16
4 responses to "Fake Spamming by SEOs?"
I suspect our behavior puts us statistically much closer to spammers than regular users. It may be as simple as having multiple accounts accessed from the same IP in too short of an amount of time. I suspect most of us have at least a few accounts that they regularly access throughout the course of a business day. Compare that to “non-SEO types” who simply don’t have multiple accounts or, if they do, only rarely switch into their alternate accounts and I’d bet it’s a pretty strong signal for them.
Another good signal for them is probably the ratio of tweets that include a link and the ratio of links to particular sites. Spammers link a lot to the same site (or network of sites) and so do most social media marketers.
Since algorithmic solutions are a necessity to defeat the worst kinds of automated spam, I expect we’ll experience the most collateral damage as social media sites tune their algorithms.
WOW, this is horrible. My Twitter account profile background image and profile photo etc had all somehow reset recently. It is probably unrelated but…
Let’s just do a toast for all the good-doers out there!
From Mongolia with Love,
MC
You are probably right. I guess we can start deeming it “fake spam” as most of us have no bad intentions, but are “super users” that might seem bad to automated algos.
Hey Mergen! Welcome to my site. The deletion of image files was separate I think, but we will never know. Twitter is going through some growing pains again, and I have a feeling this is just the beginning.