PR penalty from using fake G+/Youtube subs?

Interestingly, my buddies and I have been adding fake G+ likes and fake YT subscribers to our YT channels and web articles, and all of the sites that we did this to were downgraded in PR (from 3 to 2) in August (thereabouts). Our YT channels point to our downgraded websites, by the way.

The sites of ours that we faked the G+/YT subs were whitehat, and they have actually increased in traffic despite the decrease in PR, and all we have done is post more articles. The only mistake we seem to have done with these sites is that we have used 2 popular social media exchange sites, where we put the URL of the article/YT channel and bots or whatever/whoever can G+ or YT sub.

My theory is that G and YT (YT is owned by G) were able to track the URL referral, so that every G+ and YT subscription was referred from the social media exchange sites that we use (thet are popular social emdia exchange sites that I am sure G knows about). All of our sites that we faked the G+/YT subs (about 10 of them) were downgraded in PR, which caused the advertisers to go nuts.

With G being all obsessed with real authoritative links and websites being all about being shared legitimately, do you think that G can spot fake G+ likes and YT subscriptions and do they take it serious and will downgrade legitimate otherwise whitehat websites? I have a feeling they can and that they have recently acted on this. It's not like we used bots, we just put the article urls and YT channels on 2 legitimate social exchange sites and legitimate people can G+ or YT sub, and we don't pay for them. However, I'm fairly sure that YT frowns upon fake ubs or likes, so I'd think that G does too.

What you say?

Thanks!

P.S: we use Adsense on all these 10 sites and we haven't received any notifications on Webmaster Tools or any notifications for these faked G+/YT.

They own both of the websites. Of course they can see (up to a certain point) what is fake and what is real. Sometimes I question the "webmasters" around here. Don't you know what goes on under the hood of your websites? They aren't just some wordpress blog ran by stay at home moms. They are a company worth billions, that hire some pretty good engineers to combat the things we do.

On to your situation. There isn't enough information available to tell whether or not the fake subs/shares decreased your PR. Is there a metric within their algorithm that decreases PR because of fake shares/subs on youtube? Who knows. Maybe the other links you were getting decreased in value, because the webmasters of those links were penalized for whatever reason...But there's literally 1,000s of factors which could have caused this.

DisguiseMarketing said:

They own both of the websites. Of course they can see (up to a certain point) what is fake and what is real. Sometimes I question the "webmasters" around here. Don't you know what goes on under the hood of your websites? They aren't just some wordpress blog ran by stay at home moms. They are a company worth billions, that hire some pretty good engineers to combat the things we do.

On to your situation. There isn't enough information available to tell whether or not the fake subs/shares decreased your PR. Is there a metric within their algorithm that decreases PR because of fake shares/subs on youtube? Who knows. Maybe the other links you were getting decreased in value, because the webmasters of those links were penalized for whatever reason...But there's literally 1,000s of factors which could have caused this.

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Thanks I'm aware that the downgrading could have been due to links losing juice, although the websites were backlinked manually and had links from authority sites. No blackhatting in this sense.

We did, however, notice On Webmaster Tools that the G+ likes decreased dramatically in August which is when the PR downgrade occurred On average, we had about 200 G+ for each of the 10 sites (each site had G+ distributed among articles, 4-6 G+ per article) and the 200 G+ number went down to only 20 G+ per site. A dramatic decrease and we could see the massive trough on the graph for G+ in WMT. Surely something on the algorithm of G must have taken this into account since the decrease in G+ was visible on WMT.

The YT subs didn't go down though and were acquired from a site different to the G+.

The whole G+ dropping from 200 to 20 is what hinted me to consider fake G+ as a form of downgrading PR (and the fact that it occurred to all of our otherwise white hat sites). Also, apparently G verifies accounts via IP, so if you have several G accounts under the same IP, G accounts are deemed spammy. This means that G is making an effort to keep G+ a legitimate thing so quite possibly they would be keen to penalize sites buying/faking/exchanging G+ likes.

Thanks for the comment. Anyone else have any other opinions?

Who knows? Did you get those 200G+ shares befores going up to PR3. It may be a similar pattern to links, if you drop links/g+ massively your PR will decrease accordingly. The question is, did you lost the gain you got or you were always PR3 and then added the shared G+ feature???

Carlosse said:

Who knows? Did you get those 200G+ shares befores going up to PR3. It may be a similar pattern to links, if you drop links/g+ massively your PR will decrease accordingly. The question is, did you lost the gain you got or you were always PR3 and then added the shared G+ feature???

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I was PR3 already when I got the G+ likes. Same with other websites.

In fact, all our sites had benefited from all the G updates on April/May, quite a few of us got a message on WMT congratulating us for a spike in traffic in April.