Encouraging users to "like" or "+1" our pages

[cbielich]

Do you think its "bad" SEO or maybe google might penalize if we encourage users to like or pages or give us +1 for google?

[Aran_Smithson]

How do you propose to encourage your users to like or +1 your pages?

I've seen many companies encourage tahier website visitors to Like their pages by making the social share a requirement for entry into a competition. Ive also seen the same with tweets and getting people to retweet a URL for entry.

I suppose as long as your not forcing the user to so it, no click jacking and not buying the likes, you should be ok. Depends on your strategy.

[Keszi]

Hi Cezar,

One famous campaign that you can use is: Pay with a tweet/like/share/etc.

I have only seen positive movement around similar campaigns, so no sign of Google dislike-ing it (but they will probably +1 instead of a like ;).

Gr.,

Istvan

[bradkrussell]

By encouraging them do you mean placing the relevant social sharing buttons in a prominent position on your site? If so, that's fine, a lot of companies do that.

Give your users a reason to like/follow/+1 you and they will, just don't shove it down their throat.

[SEOclient12]

With emphasis supposedly shifting more on social signals as the year progresses I would suggest asking users to act this way will have positive effects for SEO (especially the Google interaction).

It depends how you do it though. If you are just getting people to like you in returning for you liking them etc it will build an un-natural profile (same with purchasing +1's) which won't have any benefit to you. I don't know if G algo recognises these types of profiles, but I wouldn't be surprised if it does at some point.

If you capture an engaging/relevant audience to your social media portals then it will have numerous benefits (with SEO gains potentially sitting here).

However be careful of competitions on G+. As far as I am aware it goes against their guidelines.

[cbielich]

On my big traffic pages I have "Do us a favor, if you like our tools give us a "+1" or a "like"  "