

50 Google +1s on sale at SEO shop for $9.99 - bproper
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/seo-shop-puts-50-google-1s-on-sale-for-just-999/242517/

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Symmetry
I sort of assumed that part of the point of Google+ was that you could have
+1s from your social graph weighed much more heavily. Trust only the
recommendations of people you trust, or people they trust, or so on with
diminishing weight.

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qpleple
Yes, but as long as there will be people no knowing about that, there will be
room for such freeloaders.

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nostromo
My understanding is that +1s only affect your search results if you're
connected to the person that's +1'ing. This makes ballot stuffing pointless.
(edit: effect -> affect)

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BlueMourning
It still helps with social proof. Everyone can see the number on the site.

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Udo
It probably does, but 50 plusses aren't very impressive. You'd have to buy
thousands of them in order to appear viable. And even then, most people who
are able to recognize a high "plus" ranking would probably be sophisticated
enough to recognize a spam site instantly anyway. This kind of reminds me of
those weird sites with a button on them displaying 3 million likes on Facebook
and when you look at the actual source code, it turns out they embedded the
widget with "example.com" as their site address.

Fifty ClickMob accounts on non-social sites are worth a lot more, for a short
time you could totally dominate sites like HN, Slashdot and Reddit. But
Google+ accounts that are not connected to relevant people, I just don't see
the value...

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doctoboggan
Google should buy 1000 +1s for some random obscure site and then ban all the
IPs that +1'd it.

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misterbwong
That'd be a good idea if you are sure all the +1's are coming from
illegitimate users but with the existence of botnets/malware/etc, it's very
possible that the people +1'ing have no idea they are doing it.

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mtogo
So shadowban them instead. The kind of people who would allow their system to
be compromised are not the kind of people who would care or notice if their
+1's didn't count.

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mquander
I don't believe you're serious. Not only is that untrue (practically everyone
is insecure in some way) but it's also a non sequitur; it's not the +1ers that
suffer when their clicks don't count, it's their friends, who would otherwise
benefit from having better recommendations.

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ianferrel
It's not a bad suggestion. Their friends are going to be better off without
the +1s of anyone whose account is compromised by a bot net.

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jjcm
I wonder if this could be used nefariously? Buy someone a 1000 +1 package, and
watch as their account gets banned for spam.

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altrego99
That's not a bad idea. In fact you don't need this for doing that - you will
probably _not_ want to avoid the obvious catches (like clicking from same ip
many times, too frequently, etc.).

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iamichi
Both sites (<http://seoshop.biz/> and <http://plussem.com/>) use Google
Analytics. So Google could feasibly track who makes a purchase. If you make
purchase on those sites and you've recently logged into your Google Webmaster
tools or something and then get a load of +1's Google could surely fairly
easily see that.

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seomaster440
Promoting google+ votes is becoming a very hot business. Using these types of
services could have negative or positive affects on SEO. We just have to see
how google treats them. Another place to buy google plus votes is bulkones.com
Will be interesting to see how this evolves over the next few months.

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edoloughlin
Surely Google can detect this for sites that use Google Analytics -- they know
where the majority of their traffic comes from (presumably a high-value
economy) and they know where their +1s come from. If there isn't a significant
geographical overlap, then there's something fishy going on.

EDIT: For tl;dr, The article mentions that +1s are likely coming from
developing countries.

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archgoon
This may actually be detectable. If someone who has never, based on their
search history, suddenly +1's something that would normally be outside their
interest, you could weight that plus one differently than others.

In fact, I would be very surprised if Google _didn't_ weight +1 data, and
simply used the total number as their "+1 Signal".

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josefresco
You'd be surprised how seemingly smart and dumb the Google ranking algorithm
is. SEO's have been witnessing this for years. Techniques that shouldn't work
do, and ones that are extremely complex and tricky are sniffed out by Google
engineers quicker than anyone could anticipate.

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corin_
I love how seoshop.biz offer a service to give fake product/service reviews
for $1.20/review... and yet they show reviews of their own services on their
product pages. Are these reviews meant to be convincing given they're coming
from a company that actually SELLS the ability to create bullshit reviews?

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CodeMage
Perhaps that's their "shopping window", where they showcase samples of their
merch ;)

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yeahsure
Haven't read the article, though I don't find it too strange. Anyways, I even
find that price too expensive for just 50 +1s. You can find twice that much
for half the price at Fiverr:
<http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=google+%2B1>

These kind of service ("liking", "digging", and anything that involves "votes"
of some kind) has been offered since forever, why would it be any different
with Google's +1?

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theospears
Google have a few options here:

1\. Attempt to detect these scam +1 votes, and either ignore them or penalise
the targetted sites (although the latter is risky as it can be exploited to
destroy the ranking of competitors)

2\. Focus on encouraging more genuine use of the +1 button, so any +1 results
that can affordably be bought are lost in the noise.

3\. The spy vs spy option. Start selling +1 votes themselves under a dummy
name, and then immediately remove them as spam (whilst optionally continuing
to display them in google analytics). Google could of course afford to
undercut all other sellers, and their +1 selling services could appear at the
top of all relevant searches, rather than other sites attempting the same.

Option 1 seems the most likely for google, but if I were a small startup I'd
definitely pick option 3, then blog about it a few months later.

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Farow
How about just removing the sites selling them?

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benologist
I think Digg tried to do that with a company in Australia and failed.

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simonnreynolds
Old news.. You could get this done on Freelancer.com since the beginning.. I'm
sure you could even go cheaper than $10 these days..
<http://twitter.com/#!/freelancer/status/58323985988984832>

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kooshball
Holy crap that's expensive. I'm not sure if it's scalable though. At that
price I would be surprised if the botnets used mostly for sending spam doesn't
just query google for whatever result and "click" the +1.

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AshleysBrain
You should pay them to upvote this story :)

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jgmmo
I see Google moving to use their 'news algorithm' to fight this kind of thing.
When a news site gets linked to a great deal real fast then it shoots up in
rankings, but once that super-high load disappears, suddenly as other news
articles become more relevant, then Google basically blacklists that previous
article despite that it has super-high backlinks.

Could Google just see a site get 1,000 +1's in a week and then never get
another for 2 weeks and then blacklist it like the above news algorithm?

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Farow
If you actually get +1000 and more people actually visit your site and enjoy
your service you will be probably getting some more pluses.

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mootothemax
Surely this is a side effect of Mechanical Turk-type sites and offers; if you
offer someone $0.10 for what amounts to a few seconds work, it kinda starts to
all look worthwhile.

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blhack
Maybe this is an in joke or something, but searching for "seoshop" on google
results in a landing page as the first result.

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iamichi
the article is wrong, it's not seoshop.com it's <http://seoshop.biz/>

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galactus
Is this a common practice on other +1-like buttons? (say facebook "like"s,
twitter's RTs, digg/reddit upvotes, etc)

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genieyclo
<http://subvertandprofit.com/>

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mootothemax
WOW! $1/vote for Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon etc - the cheaters must have pretty
deep pockets if they want to game the system! Or does it only take 10-20 votes
to swing things in one's favour?

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SoftwareMaven
A few, early votes are what matter, then the snowball effect takes over.

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felipemnoa
They will probably get shutdown as soon as this story gets enough attention.

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Zumzoa
How?

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felipemnoa
Good question. I don't mean the sellers. But rather the accounts that are
being sold. Meaning that the buyer of such an account will have wasted 10$.
Don't see why would anybody pay for a +1 account though. Especially since they
will eventually open the gates to everyone.

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ChuckMcM
So imagine you are a black hat for a moment. You've run your drive by malware
campaign and harvested a couple hundred thousand Google login credentials, or
maybe you just sit and wait and when the browser is open you send a +1 to the
site your master told you to send it to.

So now Google has hundreds of +1 votes coming from otherwise legitimate users.
How do they fight that?

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vaksel
remove SEOshop from organic results, and block them from Adwords until they
shut down the operation.

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Shenglong
I wonder if some algorithm using ratio of giving and receiving
+1s/circles/posts/etc could be used to curb this kind of practice, by
converting +1s of legitimate users into +2s, +3s, and so on.

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dangravell
Seems to me the inevitable end game is PeopleRank as an analog to PageRank
where Google trusts the +1s of certain people, for certain topics,
differently.

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vaksel
that is actually quite cheap...I think I saw a few months ago someone doing a
similar service for reddit, and it was like $1 per upvote

edit: didn't find the actual site, but similar:
[http://www.freelancer.com/projects/Internet-Marketing-
Link-B...](http://www.freelancer.com/projects/Internet-Marketing-Link-
Building/Reddit-Upvotes.html)

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brevityness
Humungous banner screaming "WIN AN IPAD 2!" FTW!

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j_col
It was only a matter of time ;-) Surely Google must have relaized that as soon
as they released their +1 button, some people would start gaming it?

