One of the main sources of traffic and, accordingly, potential earnings on the Internet is SMM, or social media marketing. Create a page and group on VKontakte, Facebook, Odnoklassniki, recruit several thousand friends, send them messages and make sales through social networks - this is the essence of SMM. It seems that promoting VK is not at all difficult. But... our page was banned already on the 3rd personal message. How can you avoid getting banned? We searched for information and compiled a small but very useful list of rules on what to do to avoid banning your VKontakte account.
Why VKontakte groups are blocked:
- Violation of the laws of the Russian Federation
- Blocking for cheating
If a community is blocked for cheating, it means that the first warning has already been given. Usually, when you cheat, some of the bots are written off, but not immediately, but after a week or even a month. Cheating through various exchanges for exchanging likes is the riskiest way to promote a community. Not even because they may suspect unrealistic activity, when a zero group with one post in the feed becomes ten thousand members in a week, then this is an almost 100% probability of a ban. It is unlikely that you will be able to promote such a group even to 3 thousand.
If you are going to cheat participants, then no more than 200 per day and constantly remove dogs because... if 40% of the members in the community are deleted, your group will disappear from the search in VK.
How to return the community to search ? - it's not so simple anymore. First, you need to get rid of the dogs. Simply delete all inactive accounts. Next, you need to write to technical support and wait for further recommendations. After a couple of months, your community will again be searched on VKontakte.
Any cheating is prohibited. Including: cheating of members by sending spam, cheating of members through programs such as bots or vtope, exchanges for exchanging likes, mass invitation to a group (more than 500 members per day - there is a high risk of getting the group blocked for cheating members).
If your community is blocked for cheating members , then it is best to write to technical support and tell them how you cheated. Then there is a high probability that your group will be unbanned, but all the cheated people will be removed.
Blocking a VKontakte group for cheating on members is probably the most common reason for blocking.
Increasing subscribers to a community on VK has been a very risky endeavor for two years now. Previously, it was possible to promote your group to a million people in this way, and then receive traffic from VK search, but now the management of the social network has taken a tough approach to the quality of groups and mercilessly bans all communities that are promoted in this way.
- Scams, fraud and other gray earning schemes
If your public is engaged in attracting people to participate in various pyramids and other scams, then most likely you will get a ban.
- Changing the community theme
If your community is blocked for abruptly changing the topic , then it is already very difficult to get the group out of the ban. Perhaps you will be able to prove to support that you were hacked and you were not aware of what they were doing to your community.
Changing the topic of a group is a problematic activity. After 1000 people in the community, you won't be able to change the theme so easily. Even if you just want to change the name, but leave the topic the same, then before that write to the support service and consult with them.
- Personal insult
If your community is blocked for insulting a person, then 50% of the time you will be forgiven if you write to the support service, but the second time you will be banned completely.
- Selling game accounts
Recently, this wording when blocking communities has begun to appear very often. VKontakte is prohibited from selling game accounts and accounts of this social network.
- Community blocking for pinned advertising
Pinning advertisements is prohibited by the rules of the social network. What can you pin? - any community messages that do not contain advertising.
If you have attached an advertisement that violates the rules of VK (selling votes, scams, etc.), then the ban will be immediate.
We looked at the main reasons for blocking communities. Also, do not forget that you may receive sanctions against your group. For example, for excessive advertising.
VK rules allow publishing a maximum of 3 advertising posts directly through advertisers or the VKontakte advertising exchange and 2 advertisements through the VKontakte exchange. Total: 5 per day.
If you violate this rule, you will be prohibited from creating advertisements at all for a certain period.
Hacking and “black” optimizers
Perhaps this is the only section in which no exceptions are foreseen. It does not matter which country the user is a citizen of. If he promotes hacking software or offers similar services to his clients, he will be banned. This is illegal and cannot be challenged.
At the same time, many groups become more popular by increasing user activity indicators. Likes, reposts, robot comments. And everything seems to be legal, since the criminal and administrative codes are “silent” on this matter. However, this cannot be done with impunity. The result is the same - eternal ban. It will no longer be possible to return the group. There is no point in contacting the administration of a social network and asking or proving something.
How to block a VKontakte group
So, we have come to a very interesting topic. If you, young villains, want to know if it is possible to somehow block someone else’s VK group , then, most likely, you want to get rid of your competitors.
Let's look at the main ways that you will be advised to find out how to block someone else's VKontakte community:
- mass promotion of low-quality bots, where the content of dogs will be more than 50%. Mutual PR services are well suited here, for which they sell coupons because... Basically, these services use bots, which get banned instantly. Please note that you need to invite at least 30% of the bots from the total number of participants in the group, otherwise you will simply help your competitor with promotion.
- order a repost of your message, and then change the link to a prohibited product. Such groups are blocked instantly, and not so long ago extortion of money from large public companies for such frauds flourished. Communities of even more than 4 million people were blocked.
- get a job as an admin or editor and post prohibited content.
- find violations in the group.
- order a mass invitation to a group (works only for groups). There must be more invitations than participants.
There are no other ways to block a community of competitors. But the best thing is to never use such methods, but simply make a group of higher quality than that of a competitor and defeat him fairly.
P.S. share your personal experience - how to get the community out of the ban .
Types of punishments VKontakte
For the average person, the terms “ban” and “blocking” are synonymous. But if we are talking about the social platform VKontakte, here you should understand and feel the difference. Let's say you want to visit a group and see the following:
This means that the group is not completely blocked, but only partially for residents of the Russian Federation. But it continues to exist and function on the site. It's very easy to bypass the blocking! All you need to do is use a VPN.
This will definitely work, even if the country “Russia” is indicated on the user’s personal page. The only difficulty is that the violator may lose some of the active subscribers from Russia.
They won’t use a VPN just to be able to visit a blocked group again. But the most important thing is that the administrator will be able to restore access for himself and all those users who support him in this.
Why is the group blocked for residents of the Russian Federation? The reason is quite simple: the content posted on the page violates local laws. If the community continues to exist, it means that the internal rules of the social platform have not been violated. There's nothing wrong with that. Access is “closed” for residents of the Russian Federation, but not for users from other countries.
In the case of a ban, everything looks completely different. When you try to visit a group, you will see the following message:
The system's internal search will not produce results for the requested object. Subscribers and users of the social network no longer have access to the group. The ban can be temporary or permanent (each case is considered separately).
Warned = protected?
You can spend a long time studying the reasons for punishments on a popular social platform. And when it seems that everything is extremely clear, there will always be pitfalls. Try to guess why you will be blacklisted. Let's talk about mass bans:
- In 2014, a law banning the retail sale of abortion drugs was hotly debated. Abortion groups actively participated in these discussions. It's not hard to guess how things ended;
- In 2021, a bill banning the activities of bookmakers angered representatives of various bookmakers. As a result, these companies were legalized. But the communities fell under the disgrace of the VK administration;
- In 2013-2014 Communities offering preparation services for the Unified State Exam were banned en masse. Reason: leak of valuable information. They leaked genuine answers to everyone. The most interesting thing is that at that time it was not considered something forbidden.
All this resembles a kind of “witch hunt.” To avoid getting banned, you must not only follow the current rules, but also promptly study the innovations in the user agreement.
When the administration of a social network tightens existing rules, or adds new clauses to the internal “charter,” some communities have to “sink into oblivion.” Therefore, no one can guarantee that your community is completely safe from bans.
"Safe" competitions
The administration of the social network approves of holding various competitions on the site, but monitors this very closely. Before holding the competition, it is also recommended that you familiarize yourself with the basic rules of VKontakte.
What can you get banned for:
- The results of the competition were not demonstrated/announced to the public;
- The competition contained a condition like “The promotion will be completed when a certain number of likes or reposts are reached;
- The user with the most “hearts” and reposts becomes the winner;
- Contest participants must subscribe to 2 or more public pages;
- The competition contained the condition “subscribe to the administrator’s profile”;
- The winner's profile is fake and belongs to one of the group administrators.
It is difficult to talk about the degree of severity of moderators in this case. At a minimum, they cannot keep track of everything that is happening on the network. There are millions of users on the site - it is simply impossible to control the actions of each user. Therefore, there are cases when such competitions go unnoticed. But this is just luck, not an exception to the rule! To put it mildly, next time you may not be so lucky.
Example:
In this example, the winner of the competition is selected based on likes, which is a violation of the internal rules of the system. This action took place in May 2013. The group is still functioning.
One more example:
Since cheating statistics is not prohibited, in this case it is difficult to find a violation.
Separately, I would like to say about such a common phenomenon as a dubious prize. Let's say a non-profit group has several hundred members. The community administration is holding a competition and promising an expensive prize (a car, an apartment or a cool smartphone). Here it will become obvious to everyone that the attracted users will not be able to recoup the cost of the prize. That is, we are talking about fraud. In this case, there is no “happy ending” to be expected. But a ban is easy!
