Google’s John Mueller expressed his thoughts in a series of tweets about SEOs who create fake personas for a review site, including false LinkedIn profiles. He said if they think nobody can tell that “you’re deluding yourselves.”
Fake LinkedIn Profiles To Look Legit
AI is used to catch millions of fake LinkedIn profiles every year.
An affiliate marketer who uses fake LinkedIn profiles for their author bios shared:
“As an affiliate marketer, having LinkedIn profiles for my fake persona was a great way to get credibility for my authors.
…Over the past few months, 90% of my profiles have been suspended by LinkedIn.
Unfortunately, now I have to find another method to add credibility to my authors and make them look legit.”
Fake LinkedIn Profiles are so popular that Google Suggest actually suggests searches for them.
Fake Google Business Profile Reviews
Google is suing a marketer who allegedly created and sold fake Google Business Profile reviews, as well as fake business sites.
Earlier this year Google shared that they use machine learning models to detect fake business profiles and reviews.
Google shared how they catch fake business reviews:
“We’ve long used machine intelligence to help us spot patterns of potential abuse, and we continue to evolve our technology.
Last year, we launched a significant update to our machine learning models that helped us identify novel abuse trends many times faster than in previous years.”
Google was able to block or remove 115 million reviews and blocked 20 million attempts to create fake business profiles.
They’re not kidding about being able to catch fake reviews and profiles.
John Mueller on Fake Personas
Considering how adept Google is to catching fake personas and reviews, it makes sense that Google’s John Mueller asserts that Google knows about them.
He commented in a series of tweets:
“PSA making up fake people for your review site is awkward, even with fake LinkedIn profiles.
Copying YT reviews from others together to make your own is cheap.
Submitting it as a ranking question to the office hours, uhm, what do you want us to say?
…To be honest, none of this would be a problem if you just do it all as yourself; it’s fine for one person to run a site, you don’t need multiple fake personas.”
When someone asked how can a one-person company be credible, Mueller answered:
“You lose *all credibility* once it’s obvious that you’re running a fake operation. And to all of the “nobody can tell because I do it so well” people: you’re deluding yourselves.
…What do you want me to say? “Wear a badge and get business cards?” You become credible by doing good work.”
Faking it Don’t Make It?
John Mueller may be right to say that those who think they can get away with fakes are “deluding” themselves.
Featured image by Shutterstock/mosman.photo
