Networking sites are all the rage in the Internet, especially among young people. Almost everybody—from high school students to office employees—has an account with a networking site such as MySpace or Facebook. However, the past year has seen some of these site users having more and more complaints regarding social media. These complaints all stem from the fact that almost the entire community of networking site members receive spam messages. These spam attacks start out innocently enough, as friend requests. Once you have approved these requests, they turn out to lead you to advertisements, phishing, hacking and other malware sites.

Bad for business

Networking websites like MySpace and Facebook need to do something about these spamming misdemeanors if they want to keep their members. A survey conducted showed that a majority of networking site users are ready to switch to other networks once the spamming becomes more frequent. If you can remember, a large number of MySpace members left the site and decided to transfer to Facebook. The proliferation of spamming in MySpace accounts was to blame for this loss of customers. Unfortunately, spam messages are not something that you can easily leave behind. It can follow you from one website to another, until you become a victim of phising or a malware website.

New social network sites – the next target?

Because older networking sites like Facebook and MySpace continue to attract spammers, newer and younger sites are taking this as the time to make their entrance. A couple of these fresh online faces are Twitter and FriendFeed. As these sites become popular, you can bet your SEO money that spammers will be flocking these sites too.

The SEO solution

Social media sites will come up with ways to prevent spam and punish spammers, and search engines are likely to take the cue and penalize the culprits as well. That is why SEOs looking to use social networking media to promote their messages must never resort to spamming just to get links or to get traffic. Stick to tips for social media SEO. A healthy combination of traditional SEO and social networking efforts is the best way to get higher ranks and retain a loyal reader base.