The addition of Trending to the sidebar of Twitter didn’t happen yesterday and may have been a good idea – but it surely gives spammers an inspiration. In case you don’t know how different terms appear in those trends, they are whatever people tweet the most about. Some most popular trends will have as many as 200+ tweets per minute. The idea behind them is to let you see right away what are the hot topics.
Some will post their spam and add those keywords currently showing in the trends. Why do they do it? Not only will their tweets (potentially) appear in the Twitter search results for those trends (which is what you get when clicking one of the trending topics in the sidebar), but due to Google’s new interface and its love for frequently updated content (better yet, real time updates), these tweets will appear in Google as well, resulting in the below picture:
The problem with this implementation is that, if a trend is really popular, the post will get pushed down very fast. So the spammer is forced to keep posting, watching the new appearing rends and spamming them one after another. As a result, t gets noticed by many people as irrelevant spam affecting many trending topics and eventually quite a high number of people will report the spammer’s account for spam. Hence, the accounts are short-lived and once they are blocked for spam all previous posts will disappear.
Is there a way to do it better? Actually, yes. First of all, there is no point in chasing the trends. Secondly, if you want to benefit from Twitter and/or Google’s real-time SERPs, you need to imitate a real user as much as possible instead of brute forcing the SERPs.
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