Warn Google! TwitterSpam Memes Could Game Search Rankings

By Brian Carter on April 20, 2008 7:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow I feel like I'm on the bleeding edge right now. I was checking out tweme.com, which has only been around for three months, and I noticed a weird tag in the tagcloud that was getting a lot of attention, GoodPeople. It's retweeting anything with the #goodpeople tweme tag in it- I don't know if this is an error, or a clever new type of spam.

Whether it was intentional or not, someone could do this on purpose. I call the phenomenon a speme (spam meme). On tweme.com is that a bunch of links get created, and though tweme.com currently is not the most powerful website to get SEO backlinks from, arguably any backlinks are good, and these are not nofollow links. The tweme creator might want to consider making some of them nofollows.

(more below about the Google implications after I throw out some new twitter words...)

Speme and Twitterisms
The speme word made me realize there's quite a bit of twitterism that goes on- twitterism is itself a twitterism- my word for a new word created in the twitterverse. Here are some examples that I and others have contributed to urban dictionary:

These last three are new and may not be up quite yet:

Speme Spam from Tweme in Google?
In any case, twitter is getting indexed quite well by Google, and as a whitehat SEO professional, I expect this will be gamed in some way by somebody quite soon. The whole twitter API + programming leading to retweets plus lots of new twitter-related sites like twemes going viral and getting super popular in just weeks means a whole new crop of spam for Google.

Plus, all the twitterisms means a lot of new keywords that aren't tough to rank on. It's the wild west again- lots of new keywords to mine! Pretty exciting no matter what color SEO hat you wear.

In any case, the twitterverse is moving pretty fast- I can't anticipate how people might game it and spam Google, and I'm not going to try because that will just give black hatters more ideas!

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3 Comments

Martin Jamieson said:

I think you broke that @goodpeople account Brian... it has retweeted your link to this post every minute for about the last hour, spamming even more :)

If you follow the home link in his twitter profile, there is an explanation as to why the account is there... I don't think the spam is on purpose, just some rogue script, but it does show how easy it is to mess up with the Twitter API (either accidentally or intentionally).

@martyj

April 20, 2008 9:51 PM

Geoffrey Meredith said:

I don't think that this particular instance is SPAM but is more likely, as Martin mentioned, a case of bot gone wrong.

However, I do think that the SPAMmers are looking at various ways to game twitter and the developing echo system. Just like in the email and commenting environments, the twitter world will have to adapt to this coming storm.

It's part of the price that you pay for popularity.

@twemes

April 20, 2008 10:11 PM

Brian Carter said:

Agreed, guys. I thought it was probably a broken account- thanks for your feedback, and Geoffrey, thanks for twemes!

April 21, 2008 7:34 PM