Google’s John Mueller offered his thoughts in a series of tweets about SEOs creating fake personas for a review site, including fake LinkedIn profiles. He said when you think no one can tell, “You’re fooling yourself.”

Fake LinkedIn profiles to look real

Millions of fake LinkedIn profiles are captured every year with the help of AI.

An affiliate marketer using fake LinkedIn profiles for their author bios shared the following:

“As an affiliate marketer, creating LinkedIn profiles for my fake persona was a great way to give my writers credibility.

…In the last few months, 90% of my profiles have been banned from LinkedIn.

Unfortunately, I now have to find another way to give my authors credibility and make them look serious.”

Fake LinkedIn profiles are so popular that Google Suggest actually suggests searches for them.

Fake Google Business Profile Reviews

Google is suing a marketer who allegedly created and sold fake Google business profile reviews and fake business pages.

Earlier this year, Google said they were using machine learning models to detect fake business profiles and reviews.

Google shared how to spot fake business reviews:

“We have long used machine intelligence to identify patterns of potential abuse, and we are constantly evolving our technology.

Last year, we rolled out a significant update to our machine learning models that helped us identify emerging abuse trends many times faster than in previous years.”

Google was able to block or remove 115 million reviews and blocked 20 million attempts to create fake business profiles.

They don’t joke that they can find fake reviews and profiles.

John Mueller on Fake Personas

Given how adept Google is at spotting fake personas and reviews, it makes sense that Google’s John Mueller would claim Google knew about it.

He commented on a number of tweets:

“PSA finds it cumbersome to find fake people for your review page, even on fake LinkedIn profiles.

It’s cheap to copy someone else’s YT reviews and create your own from them.

Send it to the office hours as a ranking question. Um, what would you like us to say?

…To be honest none of this would be a problem if you did everything the way you would do it yourself; It’s okay if one person runs a website, you don’t need multiple fake personas.”

If someone asked How can a one-person company be credible, Müller replied:

“You lose *all credibility* when it becomes clear you’re doing a sham operation. And to all the “nobody can tell because I do it so well” people, you’re fooling yourself.

…What do you want to tell me? “Wear a badge and get business cards?” Good work builds credibility.”

Can’t fake it?

John Mueller might be right when he says that those who think they can get away with counterfeiting are “deceiving” themselves.

Featured image from Shutterstock/mosman.photo