Why You Should Never Say “SEO” Or “WordPress” In A Tweet
Why You Should Never Say “SEO” Or “WordPress” In A Tweet
No online technology has stayed free from the grasp of spammers for long and Twitter is no different. There are a number of ways that people have harnessed the service for their own either slightly or overtly spammy purposes. The example of “never say the word SEO in a tweet” mainly falls into the slightly spammy category. SEO, or search engine optimisation, is a process of getting your website listed higher in Google and other search engines. This can be done in a number of ways and in a crowded market place suppliers are constantly touting for business. Unfortunately their tactics are often very similar to those looking for you to purchase their viagra. Any blogger will tell you that the majority of spam comments or contact form responses they get will be from SEO spammers offering to get their sites to the top results in Google.
When you make the mistake of typing SEO in a tweet, not only will about half a dozen automated bots around the web retweet your message with absolutely no relevance, apart from the fact that you have included the term SEO, you will also spend the next six months getting so called “SEO experts” the world over following you on Twitter. Some times you don’t even need to tweet something to be sucked into the world of Twitter spam. Spammers will sometimes follow you completely at random, along with hundreds of other users, hoping that they generate an audience for their spam messages. If you don’t follow them back then nothing they say will appear in your Twitter feed and your Twitter experience will be in no way effected.
The other side of this type of spam is following someone that you think might be an interesting user, only for spammers in their market segments add you for no reason at all. I have had a huge number of penny stock traders and bloggers follow me recently for no other reason than I started following someone in the sector having heard them on a podcast. As the follower relationships are open for public view on Twitter there is nothing to stop spammers simply looking through who follows that sector leader, take it that I am interested in what he has to say and assume that I might be interested in what they have to spam me with.
Photo credit: Eric M Martin on Flickr
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