While I have written several times already that Twitter or any other social site might ban you out of the blue it just happened to Rishi Lakhani aka @rishil, a well known SEO figure on social media. I even recommended following him on my SEO Twitter users list. Another SEO, @louisventer got banned alias suspended on Twitter due to “strange activity” for the same reason, he has retweeted the tweet that kills your account:

Of course I just speculate but that’s the only reason I can see for such a legit user getting suspended unless you assume that Twitter hates SEOs. @louisventer did tweet only three times afterwards so it was easy to spot:

Quick piece of advice:

Don’t tweet or retweet URLs of scam sites or suspected scam sites.

I made the same mistake a few days ago with the same scam but on another URL. Luckily I haven’t been banned.

Now @rishil is back up after getting major support from all over the place by SEO industry peers. This wave of solidarity showed the impact the search marketing crowd has on social media. It amazed me and made me proud at the same time. Here you have people who in most cases haven’t even met once and then they employ group pressure to redeem a member of the group. A group that is neither official nor even a real group, just a few hundred people scattered all over the world. Nonetheless they cooperated to get @rishil reinstated and it worked in a matter of 24 hours.

@louisventer of MediaVison hasn’t been that lucky. He hasn’t got as many supporters to raise a hell, 392 as you can see in the Google Cache. His account is still banned. Will the SEO industry have enough influence to get him back as well? I’m not sure.

This story exemplifies a few things:

• You need to be independent from social sites as they can ban you any time
• You need to create a strong personal brand on social media to be able to gain support
• Your success on social sites is very volatile, it may disappear in a snap
• Your time and effort investment on third party sites is only as good as your own assets

Sadly I was too busy getting banned elsewhere (I’ll blog that next week on SEO 2.0) to notice the short disappearance of @rishil until he announced his come back but maybe I can help Luis Venter/@louisventer. Why should we help him as well? In case he does not get unsuspended more of us will probably face the same problem in the future.

Please RT: Bring back Louis Venter alias @louisventer now! #louisventer http://bit.ly/1HQNHY

Disclaimer: I don’t know Louis Venter, he in a way is a competitor of SEOptimise but he’s also a colleague who deserves support.

Tags: ban, rishil, scam, suspended, twitter
Posted in social media, twitter |