Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 232 posts

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#101

Post by sneak »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #45
rococode wrote: post #32

An interesting thing about paid reviews - you can prove that the reviews are fake, but you usually can't prove that the business itself actually paid for those reviews. In a hypothetical world where companies with fake reviews are regularly discovered and lambasted in public, it's easy to imagine a sinister metagame where unscrupulous small businesses can buy bad good reviews (i.e. 5-star reviews that are obviously f…

That's fine. Just charge the fake reviewers and fake review companies with FCC violations, and remove their reviews. Have them hand over their books for lighter penalties, then hit the companies buying fake reviews with enforcement orders as well. Of course, all this is complicated by the fact that most of these companies are probably overseas . . .

> Just charge the fake reviewers and fake review companies with FCC violations, and remove their reviews.

Then, as a sibling comment pointed out, you just pay to get obviously fake mass positive reviews for a competitor, and suddenly they have a null rating because the market has removed all the reviews.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#102

Post by cmckn »

I can't help but wonder if reviews should just be eliminated.

I don't have a guess as to how Google would handle that. But for something like Amazon -- surely it would be easier for Amazon to vet the products they list than to vet all the reviews for those products? When I shop on Amazon, the only reason I read the reviews is to determine if a product is shitty or not. If Amazon had a decent standard of product quality, I don't really need the review section. Besides, I can always return it if Amazon (or the reviews) are wrong.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#103

Post by LegitShady »

thehappypm wrote: post #96
ghoward wrote: post #25

I once wrote a negative review of a business on Google, and it went up, but when I went to look at the business's reviews under my wife's Google account, it was not there. I waited an hour and checked. Then a couple hours and checked. Then a day. It never showed up. I posted the review under her account and did the same checks for my account. It never showed up. I do not know why it didn't show up, but I wouldn't be…

It's highly possible that Google has some concept of freezing reviews while it investigates something. Maybe that business was caught buying reviews and so Google stopped allowing new ones for a while. Or it reported it was getting spammed. Or some other situation like that.

>It's highly possible that Google has some concept of freezing reviews while it investigates something

I doubt google is investigating each bad review they receive, though, so it happening to both accounts is odd.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#104

Post by RileyJames »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #59
kofejnik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't think FCC will prosecute bodyshops in India and Phillippines

I wonder the extent to which it's possible for such body shops to get accounts that are believed by Google to live in the U.S. (or fake-review destination country of choice). I see sites that purport to offer such accounts for 30-50 cents per account. So I guess it's not that expensive. I wonder how often these accounts get burned and how much revenue they generate with each account beforehand.

That’s exactly what services like luminati.io (holavpn) are used for. While accounts can be purchased, they then need to remain tied to a US IP address to avoid being restricted.

There are some legitimate uses to proxy through residential IPs, but I wonder what percentage of traffic through luminati is legitimate. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a single digit percentage.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#105

Post by rorykoehler »

ghoward wrote: post #25

I once wrote a negative review of a business on Google, and it went up, but when I went to look at the business's reviews under my wife's Google account, it was not there. I waited an hour and checked. Then a couple hours and checked. Then a day. It never showed up. I posted the review under her account and did the same checks for my account. It never showed up. I do not know why it didn't show up, but I wouldn't be…

If the business is an Adwords customer then there is a conflict of interest.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#106

Post by amelius »

Laremere wrote: post #52
ghoward wrote: post #25

I once wrote a negative review of a business on Google, and it went up, but when I went to look at the business's reviews under my wife's Google account, it was not there. I waited an hour and checked. Then a couple hours and checked. Then a day. It never showed up. I posted the review under her account and did the same checks for my account. It never showed up. I do not know why it didn't show up, but I wouldn't be…

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" Given how well known other unscrupulous review service tactics are (eg, yelp) I doubt this would be the case. It's hard to keep such practices secret when they involve attempting to extract money from a large number of businesses. Plus Google seems to be reasonably honest about labeling (even if very subtly) when things are sponsored ads or n…

How does "stupidity" explain that the poster's account showed the review but someone else's account didn't?

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#107

Post by suddenexample »

jedberg wrote: post #39

If feels like this could be solved if Google/Yelp/Etc wanted to solve it, but it would cut into their profits. Give the business an app to generate unique QR codes for each customer, and then have that customer use the code to make the review. Now everyone knows that the review comes from a person who actually bought the product, the reviewer is more likely to be honest because their identity is known to the seller,…

There are often a variety of overly simplistic solutions to a problem that address one issue but sacrifice a lot in return. The reality is that fake reviews are incredibly difficult to solve.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#108

Post by [deleted] »

Lerc wrote: post #93

I got an an offer to give me five star reviews for a modest fee. When that happened I had a look around to see what I could do to report them to stop their behaviour. I found absolutely nothing. Much like when the algorithmic banhammer hits you, the options for actively communicating with Google in a meaningful manner are close to non-existent.

[deleted]

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#109

Post by alert0 »

ghoward wrote: post #90
hayst4ck wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am no google fanboy, but I WOULD be surprised to find such a thing. The reason I would be surprised is history and alignment. Google consistently has bad/non existent customer service It is famously hard to talk to a google employee when you have a problem Google has a history of primarily hiring devs Google knows its bread and butter is legitimate results Google probably has the largest most experienced anti-SEO t…

This is a great reply to my post and answers me better than any of the others I have seen thus far.

Any curse words or something that a system might flag?

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#110

Post by teekert »

I used to use and love a fintech app, they pivoted (in a way) from targeting banking nerds (with features like on the fly coupling of cards to accounts, an API, unlimited simple payment websites, etc, really nice, innovative features) to targeting "the Green crowd" (integrated their Insta feed into the app, pushed a more expensive subscription with social features that planted trees as you spend money, etc). I saw them go from 4.5 to below 2 stars over the course of a couple of days. But then after some days they were back at 4.7 with the CEO gloating that everyone loved the new version even more than the old one. The forum and the play store were filled with emotional complaints and even new users must have been bothered by all the bugs the new version introduced. I don't believe any of the play store reviews anymore since then.

The pivoting is fine and I can see that it is annoying when your early adopters "cripple" the launch of your all new app with a sub 2 star rating. But imo it was justified in this case because where the old app was super stable and fast, the new app was littered with bugs and features became much more difficult to find.

Post reply on HN