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Twitter spam-girl

Twitter spam sucks. Unbelievable how clumbsy it is. When I open twitter in the morning I feel happy about 30 new follower. Not only today but nearly everyday. And I wonder why most times nice looking girls follow me… No, of course I do not wonder anymore. Every day a legion of good looking girls with nice private avatar-pictures waits for me in the follower list. And they look at me and say: „Follow me, baby!“ Each one seems to be unique and single. But if you look on their profiles it’s allways the same: the have about 20-50 followers, and they follow about 500 – 800 other people. And: until now they haven’t said anything…

Twitter follower girls

Behind their cute mask it is pure twitter-spam. But obviously there are guys around the world who likes to follow these machines. And of course, if you follow one of these little girl-machines, sometimes she/it will start to talk. She will be cute, and after a while she sends some links. The linked sites sell pharmacy or dating-services or what ever – in on word: spam and maleware.

Delete or not delete?

This is the question. What to do with these nice little spam-maschines? Should I delete them manually, should I tweet them as @spam, or should I do nothing? (Delete means: block them so that they couldn’t follow you anylonger.

The more the better?

The spam programmer use a simple psychological trick. It is nice to have a lot of follower. Many people are proud of many follower. If somebody consider to follow your account he might look on the number of follower. The idea is: the more follower the better the account. But what will search-engines like Google suggest if the crawl your account?

Twitter could be a strong ranking-signal. But how it works is not clear at all. Some days ago Rand Fishkin tweets: „This AM @SmashingMag tweeted our SEO Guide. Now we rank #4 for just „Beginner’s Guide“ https://seomz.me/fzUyan #ahthepoweroftweets„. The seomoz-page climbs up on position 4 because a really strong twitter-account postet a link. And of course a lot of people retweeted it. The twitter signals are strong enough to push the linked site on the first result page.

How to become a „strong tweeter“?

I think basically a strong twitter-account needs trust. And trust means: the followed people are clean and human. On the other hand: the follower are also clean and human. It seems to be a lot of work, and it is allways hard to decrease the number of followers. But in long-term everybody should delete/block these spam-follower.

There are more signals for searchengine to decide how influental a twitter-account is. I think it is neccessary to tweet a mixture of

• single text-Tweets (e.g. „I am at home and drink a lot of beer“)
• communication (e.g. „Hi @mattcutts my blackhat is covered with snow“)
• retweets (e.g. „RT @bing Google -8% , bing +2% , thanx for copygate“)

Twitter dead

I am sure that Google will not analyse the semantic meaning of a tweet. Important is the mixture that shows: the tweeter is humanoid. And if others will retweet it shows: the tweets seems to be good. Trust is allways a long-term issue, so it took a while and some maintenance. The more power- and trustfull people follow one account the more power get the tweets of this account. But if you don’t have a trustfull twitter account it is dead for seo.

Twitter-links are „short-term-signals“

The mentioned seomoz article is actaully on position 12 in the serps (keyword „Beginners guide„). Two days ago I saw it on position 14. In my oppinion this shows that twitter-links have a strong „short-term-impact“. After 24 hours the links loose the power. That means for seo: twitter is very usefully for „short-term-optimization“. If you optimize for „Valentin’s Day“ you should try to spread the link at the evening before valentin’s day. And of course you should have a powerfull twitter account.

Conclusion: block them!

I would recommend to block these spammy girl-machines. Even if they will be deleted after a while. But who knows when or how often the googlebot crawls your follower-page. The risk to loose trust is too big. So every morning I block a list of girls from twitter. Sorry :-)

How to block Twitter spam-follower

Last point: if you are a good looking girl or woman you should think about this. Perhaps it is better to start your account with another photo ;-)

Btw, here’s my account: twitter.com/#!/mssfldt

Read more?

• TechCrunch: „Here Comes Twitter Spam And How To Fight It„
• Mashable: „Twitter Spam: 3 Ways Scammers are Filling Twitter With Junk„
• ReadWriteWeb: „Is Spamming Twitter Good Google SEO?„