Unclank: How Google plans to Control Black Hat Spam of Google Plus One Button

The Google Plus One button has been the late craze of both the SEO world and the social network marketers. It works wonders! It shares content and it increases your rankings in the search engines according to the quantity (and perhaps, quality) of the +1 of a webpage. Now that we have that established as a fact, a lot of black hatters would naturally come into play. How would Google control the spamming of the Google +1 button?

Lots of people are taking advantage

Warrior forums is even selling +1's like pancakes.

Why not sell a Google +1 service when it works? And that’s just what’s happening right now as many people try to abuse the ability of the +1 button to increase search engine rankings.

Quality as an indicator

One of the ways that Google claims to clean this up is by looking into the quality of +1′s by the relevance of the user who +1′d a page into all his other +1′s – kinda like Facebook’s Like button. The history of a user’s +1 tells a lot about the preferences and (for a lack of a better word) ‘likes’ of that certain user.

Google can see spam activities either by the rate of +1 a user is giving (and the quality of those +1′s) and by the rate a website is getting +1′s. Google can also make the +1 of all the other people in the Circles of that certain user as an indicator of the quality of that user’s +1. Relevance will set the tone for quality – and quality can set the tone for spam indication.