Trade of Google+1 "Likes" as a Business 83
siliconbits writes "Selling Google+1 "likes" is gradually becoming a rather lucrative business, helped by cheap labour and ever-falling internet access worldwide; the trend is not unlike what we saw previously with Twitter & Digg during the days except that this has a more widespread implication for SEO and could turn the nascent social networking service into a massive headache for Google as many try to game the system. Google+1 selling sites like Googleplus1supply, buygoogleplus1 or Blackcatseo have cropped up during the last few months — amongst so many other websites — with the sole aim of selling Google+1 "likes" to publishers and businesses."
Not really a problem.. (Score:5, Informative)
The only thing that Google+ is saying about their +1 affecting search ranking is that it will only increase the ranking of sites that people in your circles have +1'd.. so unless you plan on following a bunch of spam bots on Google+ I really don't see how this is an issue..
"+1 helps people discover relevant content—a website, a Google search result, or an ad—from the people they already know and trust"
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1140194
Crowdsourcing FAIL (Score:5, Informative)
This is why "crowdsourcing" consistently fails as a method of business ranking. It's too easy to spam. Google was burned by this late last year when they were counting reviews on Citysearch and Yelp. That backfired badly. [nytimes.com] Local search results were polluted with junk entries. Google got a lot of bad press over this. Since then, they've stopped counting "likes" on competing sites, but they still count their own.
Google's ad customers have been complaining local spam for years, [google.com], and Google hasn't been able to fix it. It's become worse since Google combined local results with web search results, and the value of local spam went up.