Do you have a Facebook account for your biz but don't have many "likes" ?

This is an interesting scam.

Sell people a list of "likes" to boost their profile on Facebook. Here's an npr article on the business.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/16/152736671/this-guy-will-sell-you-sell-you-1-000-facebook-likes


And here's what Facebook feels about it:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/261828/facebook_cleanses_pages_of_fraudulent_likes.html

There are several websites that sell likes, tweets and G+ clicks. They started to surface right after Google announced that it considered social media in it's algorithm.

I looked into it for our websites but I figured that Google & Facebook would realize that unnatural methods were being utilized when someone went from 10 likes to 10,000 likes in a few days.

There are even websites which allow you to trade likes. You like a hundred or so random websites and then other people like yours.

Google needs to realize that people are going to manipulate any system they believe will influence search engine results.

its not a scam its a marketing tactic. think about when your watching youtube videos are you more likely to watch a video with 50,000 views or 5 views, probably 50k b/c you assume if 50k people like it it must be good. same goes for following someone on twitter or liking something on facebook somenoe is more likely to follow someone with more followers.

is it an artificial boost? yes but none the less its easier to get alot of followers when you have alot of followers.ive sold facebook likes, youtube views, youtube favs, youtube followers, pinterest pins, instagram followres, pinterest repins and basically everything you can do on any social network. occasionally people will complain and say its bot accounts or european accounts. well no duh anyone with a brain understands how this works. if you want targeted followers expect to pay up to $10 per followre however i can get you 10000 followers for like $30.

there's really not much harm in doing this the followers do fall off after a while but when you get thousands or tens of thousands for like $20 or $30 no big deal plus its meant to be all about perception and a temporary boost anyways.

Yes, I see the temporary advantages; however, Google is very good at detecting unnatural changes. If someone goes from 50 likes to 10K likes in a matter of days or weeks, it's going to raise a red flag. As someone who was a victim of the latest Google Penguin update, let me give you some advice, doing things naturally is the theme for SEO in 2013.

Facebook likes and G+ clicks take time to earn. Take this forum for example. When I bought this site in November, I had to create a new Facebook page (for technical reasons). Despite having Like buttons on every page and over 10K page views a day, we have only received 7 likes in a 4 month period. What I'm getting at is, they don't come easily at first. However, once you get a lot of natural likes, they tend to snowball into more. The key word being natural. Bots don't share things with their friends. 

What I'm getting at is, they don't come easily at first.

It could also be that this site caters to those whom have better things to do with their time then to spend it facebooking.

As someone who was a victim of the latest Google Penguin update.......

Wiki's take on how much you were affected.

Penguin’s effect on Google search results
 
By Google’s estimates,[7] Penguin affects approximately 3.1% of search queries in English, about 3% of queries in languages like German, Chinese, and Arabic, and an even bigger percentage of them in "highly spammed" languages. On May 25, 2012, Google unveiled another Penguin update, called Penguin 1.1. This update, according to Matt Cutts, was supposed to affect less than one-tenth of a percent of English searches. The guiding principle for the update was to penalise websites using manipulative techniques to achieve high rankings. Penguin 3 was released Oct. 5, 2012 and affected 0.3% of queries.[8]

Yes, unfortunately some quality sites got caught up in it. When I added the advertisements for my Texas site on this forum, I didn't think much of it. The forum has a modification called "no follow all links" installed. For the layman, this means that links that people post on the forum won't transfer page rank or be seen as a recommendation of another website. For some reason, the link that I placed to my Texas site wasn't "no follow," and since the ad appears on every page, Google saw over 3000 new links pointed at my Texas site and they assumed that I was attempting to manipulate the system. My Texas site went from ranking in the top ten nationally to the abyss, not even in the top 100 search results. Single page websites full of spam are ranking higher than my DMOZ listed news website with over 250 quality articles. Google really needs to rethink the way they're doing things. Google is allowing sites that feel they were unfairly effected to file an appeal. I filed mine 3 weeks ago with no response yet. Thank God that we're well established and that my members are loyal, otherwise Google could have wiped me out completely.

If you're looking for more likes, but don't really care about the quality of the like, do a facebook search for "ladders" or "like ladders". There's a whole network of networking pages who's intention is to add more likes to pages. Basically, they post a like ladder, you put your link to your facebook page. People like your page, you return the favor. Typically, these people are in network marketing and home party type people. I have a Facebook page for my other business, and have about 730 likes, some by these ladders, but mostly by local businesses.

I used this website for a while.  http://likeexchange.net/  I'm not sure if anything ever came out of it. If it did, it wasn't much and it came very slowly.

And of course there are those things marketed by forum member rulesforrebels.