Selling Facebook Likes - are these quality Likes?

Question

People/companies selling Facebook Likes guarantee 100-1000 likes for your Facebook page. Some say "real looking likes", "permanent likes", "verified", etc.

I figured I'd try one of these guys out, and got 95 likes on a page.

In my initial investigation of these likes, this is what I found:

• All had 100+ friends, many of which are linked (all seem to have the same "friends")
• All started around October with various quotes like "If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live.", all posted on their timelines, with no new posts since February.

These statuses seem to come from db's like that at cutefacebookstatus dot c()m (not providing them with any type of link-back).

I there some application that's auto-generating these pages for these people?

Do these types of "Likes" end up hurting a FB page's ranking/ability to help the web page it points to?

Answer 1

The point of facebook is that it is social. The value of a like is not the like itself but the network of people it connects to. Pages arn't popular because they have x likes, they are popular because a natural like indicates a number of real people are recommending to their real friends. So buying fake likes is of very little benefit.

Answer 2

Who knows how they're generated. Could be a script, could just be a person in a room creating fake accounts. It doesn't matter how, what matters is that they're fake.

While I don't think there is a penalty for this type of thing (yet), they're definitely not going to help. The point of using Social websites as an SEO signal is that if lots of people are actively sharing and discussing your content, it's a pretty good sign that it's probably good content. These bots won't be doing any of that.

You also risk several other things: 1) In the future, Google/Bing/Facebook may update their algorithms to penalize people that they know have been buying links. 2) The company you purchased the Likes from decides that they'll start using their "bots" to spam pages, in which case you're page gets hammered by spam, creating a poor experience for your real users. 3) The accounts are deleted, which would make it appear that a whole bunch of people un-liked your Page, which could send negative signals.

Answer 3

I am completely agree with @nathangiesbrecht.

According to my point of view getting such likes would not help in getting any social juice. User would not get any positive response from such fake likes. So its better to get all real followers by making your content more interested and informative.

Answer 4

They are obviously not quality likes, you can usually buy an 100 of them for 10 dollars. But still buying fake likes can be of benefit for two things:

1. Until you don't have 25 likes you are not able to view FB page statistics.

2. People visiting your site might be well impressed by seeing the FB widget that shows 500 likes. Far more impressed than adding fake testimonials, have you ever seen those boxes on every site that starts with: "Customers are saying about us..." and follows with: "It's cool, this software helped us sooooo much - Joe Blow CEO of Full Of Crap Ltd" or the logos of huge corporations and the saying "Who is using our software: General Electric, AT&T, PG&E, IBM..." Please give us a break.