http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-_BnVYuMb0

I see this on forums all over the internet. Someone comes in and asks about a product, seemingly just a curious person and then these people show up from out of the blue and start going on about how great this product is. Typically it's one person with multiple accounts, but it can be a network of friends who are spamming every forum they can find about certain products. It really ruins it for people who are genuinely asking about a product, and invariably a forum regular will join in and then the thread appears to be legit when it's really just a scheme.

A good indicator of this lies in the posting times. Watch for posts that are just a couple minutes apart. Although this is no guarantee, it's common for sock puppet accounts to post almost immediately after a question is asked, and you rarely if ever see the posters before or after that thread.

People find creative ways to get free forum advertising.

We try and track multiple accounts on same IP. We handle a lot of that behind the scenes. It happens though so as always I would really do my homework BEFORE I made a big purchase based on an internet post.

funny...

sometimes I think Daiwa has plants on forums because I almost never see another fisherman actually using their reels...

Obviously you have never been in my boat.

I like Daiwa

I ran across some of that a few days ago and it's so annoying that I decided to post about it, hoping it keeps some people from getting involved in those conversations where someone is pushing a product. It's such a dog and pony show. Sponsors are one thing,those are required for a good forum to continue, but like most here I don't like being peddled to by snake oil salesmen. However, if there's a good product that someone is really impressed with, it's in our best interest to know about it.

Diawa makes good reels, I used them for years.

Well I think one reason is simply for search engine placement. One of the biggest contributing factors to placement on Google is links to a site from external sources.

So if Google indexes a page that has alot of fishing keywords and finds a link to a companies site, it lends more credence to that site since it was linked to from a site with many fishing keywords.

So even if we all ignore these guys, they are still accomplishing their goal. The TFF links to their site and has multiple keywords. When Google indexes the page they more heavily associate those keywords with the site that these yahoos are linking to.

You really wanna get their goat. Change the link in the posts to a competitor's site.

Daiwa is the only brand I have. 14 in boat, 6 backups at home and 8 that my grandkids are using.

Funny stuff. It's amazing what people will do to push their product/service.

Learn something every day. Never heard it called sock puppet marketing, but it's an old trick, like the snake oil guy having a mark in the crowd who get's healed or whatever.

I like to think of my self as an seo expert. The problem with this forum is the links are NO Follow so they wont help in google anyways. So they are wasting there time

It's not for google search engines. People drop posts on multiple forums asking about products and then use the email notifications to see who bites. They then use sock puppets or friends to reinforce the notion that the product in question is great. It works in reverse as well, when people want to bash a product, especially a competitor.

I had Daiwa rods and reels.