I was offered 2,000 Facebook Likes for $60 today, from someone offering a service that allows you to buy Facebook Likes. According to this unsolicited commercial email (spam), getting more Facebook Likes will increase your search engine rankings. And the sender, Nick Grey, even says that Matt Cutts from Google said so.
Here is the email I received. Note that my domain name, LinkEarning.com, even though it has a small one-page website, has not really been developed. I’m even amazed that it has one Facebook Like. It really shouldn’t at this point.
On 8/31/13 10:49 PM, “Nick Grey”
wrote: Hello,
My name is Nick Grey, and I am a professional social media manager.
I have something to offer that might interest you. Would you like to extend your reach online? Would you like to promote your products and services directly to your target audience?
In todays world, interaction between companies and their potential and existing customers is carried out through social media. Googles software engineer, Matt Cutts, has confirmed reports that Google uses social signals, such as links from Facebook and Twitter, as a ranking factor. If you want your website to get a high rank in Google searches, your site should have a lot of links on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.You can see the current number of links/Likes to your website LINKEARNING.COM on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://LINKEARNING.COM
I want to help you improve your link popularity on Facebook and as a result, increase its ranking in Google searches! I can place more than 2,000 Facebook links/Likes from your country on your website for $60.
For this offer, you dont even need a Facebook account or fanpage. Plus, I work without prepayment: payment is made after all the work is done!
If you have any questions, please send them to me. I will try to answer them in the shortest time possible.I also have other offers: additional followers for Twitter channels, additional Likes for Facebook fanpages, additional do-follow SEO-links, and much more.
If this does not interest you, I’m sorry to have bothered you! Have a good day!Sincerely,
Nick Grey
What is interesting to note is that you can go to https://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://LINKEARNING.COM and change out “LINKEARNING.COM” with your domain name and see how many Facebook Likes your domain/site has had.
While representative have said publicly that social signals are being taken into account, the official statement back in 2012 from Matt Cutts (I heard him in person say this) went like this:
Google has a 10 year plan for relying on social factors as a part of the algorithm.
So, while social factors are a (small) part of the search engine algorithm of Google, keep in mind that it takes 10 years for Google to fully “trust” the social signals. So, in my professional opinion, social signals will “count more” over time. And right now, they’ve been using social signals for only a few years now. Just because you get 2,000 Facebook Likes on a URL or domain name doesn’t mean that it will move your search engine rankings one bit.
If you were to buy 2,000 Facebook Likes from this guy names Nick Grey, most likely all of those Facebook Likes are going to be from fake Facebook accounts. There will be no social engagement after they Liked your page or your domain/site. Social engagement is key, and that’s what the search engines are watching–not the number of actual Likes.
I can say, though, that if your Facebook page has no Likes at all, and someone comes across your page, they are less likely to Like your page. This is for a Facebook business page, and not just a Like on your domain/site. No one likes to be the only one who Likes a page.
By the way–I think Nick Grey actually has it all wrong here. He should have mentioned that Bing.com has a relationship with Facebook, not Google. So, your website could potentially rank better if it has more Facebook Likes. Google doesn’t generally have access to the Facebook Like data like Bing.com does.
So, does buying Facebook Likes help your search engine rankings? No, not with Google.
