Due to immense rise in popularity of social networking websites search engine spammers are targeting unsuspected social networking users with different types of attacks. Attacks include spamming them with money schemes, junk services / products and even luring them to click on links that might lead to phishing or downloading malware.
Social networking sites are aware of all these negative ways and have tons of ways to flag a page or report a spammer. But spammers are increasingly efficient and they find many innovative ways to spam unwary people in social networking circles.
Spammers will 1st lure people from following them or becoming their friends and will later try to push their articles or links to get the impressed link to their website. There are many who try to use social networking to promote their website. They create fake fan pages and rake in lot of people to follow them. But the primary purpose of the fan page will be to push their links for search engine visibility or the users to pick and link to them.
The way the social networking sites are setup, they give the ability to create as much accounts as possible, as long as the spammer has different IPs or has the option to mask his fake profiles. Popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace allows a link to your site and spammers take advantage of it. Though the links are nofollow they still get some exposure to search engines. Some sites like YouTube will remove the nofollow if you build some popularity and reputation and if Facebook, MySpace follows it, spammers will look to increase the follower or friend count for backlink benefit. MySpace and Facebook allows you to create pages either for your Business or for personal websites and spammers will embed as many links as possible in this for search engine benefit.
LinkedIn, another popular Business social networking website does not use nofollow for its main page links and this helps spammers create multiple profiles to promote their backlinks for search engine benefit. Twitter has nofollow on almost all links submitted but due to the popularity of twitter even it is abused for link and referral benefit. It's not just for links alone search engine spammers get benefit from submitting as many links as possible and if someone notices a link they will refer it to others and can also link from their websites.
SEO experts are aware of the importance of social networking in future optimization and they recommend every company that comes to them for promotion, to make a strong presence in social media. This makes social media much more susceptible for attacks by SEO spammers.
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