I’m not sure which hat you want to call this — honestly, I wouldn’t consider it blackhat seeing as you mass following people really does nothing negative to those people and they are under no obligation to follow you back. Many Twitter experiments have found that you can get around 10% of people you mass follow to follow you back — even if they don’t know you and have never heard of you.

Twitter Spamming

The main reason I don’t consider this blackhat is because pretty much everyone on Twitter does it. I have approx 1000 followers on 2 Twitter accounts and I can’t imagine how anyone could find time to follow more people… People following 10,000+ people? Give me a break. It’s not humanly possible to actually listen to what these followers are all saying. Sure, most won’t go out and use a program like FlashTweet or find a Twitter power user in their niche and follow all his followers, however I really don’t see any difference between using automated mass following software and following everyone who follows you when you don’t give a damn about them, what they say, or what they do.

In all honesty, I think a lot of Twitter users know many of the people following them likely don’t have pure intentions. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I know many people on Twitter and other social networks seem to be in some sort of pissing contest about who can get the most friends/followers. To them, having 10,000 untargeted followers is better than having a few hundred people who genuinely care about what they say. Think of it like having a website — Who doesn’t look at their traffic and/or Alexa stats on a daily basis, neither of which say anything about whether visitors are interested or not in your content? Who submits their posts to Digg, StumbleUpon, Reditt, etc, hoping to land some of that extremely untargeted traffic just to pump up your traffic and Alexa rank stats? Who engages in questionable SEO practices or targets keywords unrelated to their website just because they think they can get more traffic to their site that way?

Utterly Clueless Advertisers

I always find it somewhat funny when people try to justify why it costs $X to advertise on their site and use something like “I get 10,000 uniques per month, I have 100,000 page views per month”, etc. Honestly, what does it mean at all? If I wanted to, I could pump this blog’s unique visitor account up to 100,000 visitors and then I could employ a few strategies to intentionally inflate my Alexa rank. If you’re selling advertising on your site, that really is a genius idea and most advertisers are so utterly clueless, they’re likely to not even notice — and even if they do, you never made them any promises about the quality of unique visitors, merely the amount of unique visitors. If you actually care about growing your site into a community of like-minded individuals however, these tactics are of no benefit.

We All Manipulate

Can you or anyone you know honestly say they’ve never tried to manipulate search engine rankings? Hell, SEO itself is all about manipulating search engine rankings. Linkbait is often about tricking clueless bloggers into linking to your controversial material that you intentionally wrote to be controversial and get links you quite honestly don’t deserve. Badges/Widgets — that has to be the pinnacle of gaming the system. I had someone email me yesterday saying I had won a “Domainer of the Month” award. Now as this post has probably shown you, I’m often suspicious of the intentions of others. Lo and behold, his site has an Alexa rank of 13 million. Clever strategy ain’t that — try and stroke the ego of a guy getting 100 times as much traffic as you are and then ask him to write a blog post on his blog about their site and the award that I supposedly won. I’d name and shame, however that’d be giving him the traffic he wants. Badges really are great — tell people they’re #1 or #2 in their industry and get them to proudly show of their #1 or #2 rank on their website — of course 99% of the time there’s a link going back to the creator of these badges, so you really have to wonder if they created the badgets to award the best or to award their website with a bit of extra link juice. Seeing as nofollow is no more, you’re killing your pagerank no matter what by linking to these trivial ego boosters. My site really is that great? How about you send me some money instead of some lame badge

Widgets — hmm, I wonder why someone spent hours of their time making something only to give it a way for free… To be fair, there are some great, honest developers who want to help grow the blogging community, however there’s equally as many that have hidden links in there to boost their pagerank at the expense of yours. How many times does someone email you asking to swap links? Notice a pattern? How often do they have a lower pagerank than you do? They’re often not swapping links out of the goodness of their heart — they’re knowingly swapping links at your expense. Article writers.. How many people will volunteer to write an article on a PR0? How many would do it on a PR5? It’s not about helping you, it’s about helping them.

Reality

Black hat, grey hat, white hat… There really is only one kind of SEO hat and that my friends is a black hat.

Related posts:

1. Twitter 101
2. Social Media’s Effect on Search Engines
3. Link Building