As you may know, Facebook “Likes” are the new social currency. The more people “like” your site, post, article or product, the higher Google is going to prioritize you in search results.
So, that system begs for corruption doesn’t it? The shady company is going to say, how can I beat the system? How can I get a whole bunch of fake “likes” as cheaply as possible?
Enter the “like farm“. Now, this type of problem has been around since the beginning of search. You’re probably aware of Google’s “link farming” problems which polluted their search results. But this is a whole new issue to figure out. Because the value of paying for false likes is there. When a user “likes” a company’s content, it shows up in their friend’s news feed. And depending on their friends, the company’s offering is exposed to a whole lot of people.
We’ll see if Facebook can figure this one out in a less painful way than Google had to.