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UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

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Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#131

Post by pbhjpbhj »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #42
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…

> I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews There is no way to do this that I can find documentation of on the public internet. You'd think if it were possible, someone would have written a howto guide. Personally, I'm deeply skeptical that any such mechanism exists. The revenue it would generate would be negligible and the potential for reputation loss s…

Kinda like how they handle false copyright claims by not taking down the content, oh wait ... that seems a similar situation in that acting on false content takedown requests doesn't get them [much/any] revenue and provides a relational hit to users (but pleases some huge customers, no doubt).

Someone has given a credible mechanism for take down, report it as fraudulent. I find it highly likely that if you have a paying B2B relationship - eg you're a high paying advertising client, that you'd be able to report "frauds" and get immediate action.

But if course I've wouldn't know, and presumably Google would have NDAs for businesses in any special access (it would also be detrimental to the business to disclose it and risk losing the special access).

All we've really got is our TrustRank RTM on our part experiences with Google and similar corps.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#132

Post by ghoward »

throwaway_1301 wrote: post #121
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…

disclaimer: Google employee. Views my own. You can not pay to change Google reviews. Period. And the theories of "you dont know whats happening in all parts" is not true because I looked at detailed numbers myself and other than legal processes, everything was clearly visible. If anything Google has a clearly different org and we often told very highly paying customers that even if they were paying us hundreds of mil…

Note that I didn't say Google let businesses pay for reviews; all I said was that "I wouldn't be surprised" if Google let businesses do the spam filtering and flag reviews.

What I really meant is that I don't trust Google in this situation. That lack of trust still exists and is not a conspiracy.

And I _would_ be surprised if Google actually did the right thing here.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#133

Post by JetAlone »

tasssko wrote: post #124

I feel for business owners today, reviews are gamed more than ever and as a result have become much less valuable, harder to use for consumers, and with this fraud a few bad reviews can tarnish what is an unblemished customer service record. When making purchases i find i skip over dozens of reviews to find one or two that have some quality to them i can relate to based on the product and my expectations. When i see…

Absolutely. Reviews have been gamed for a long time.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#134

Post by Nextgrid »

osrec wrote: post #129
wyldfire wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For at least the last couple of years I ignore them entirely. I just have zero faith in any of them anymore. The problem some ten-ish years ago were bogus computer-generated reviews. But now the bogus reviews are written by humans and are smart enough to sound balanced. I don't know what to do. But for now, I subscribe to Consumer Reports and use price as a proxy for quality.

On Amazon, they could just make the refund/returns rate for a product public. That would probably be a pretty good quality indicator for physical goods.

They'd just start buying their own product (which then goes right back into the supply chain) to skew the numbers. However, I do agree this is a good next step as it ups the costs significantly (the transaction fees as well as logistics of having to move your product in a loop) compared to buying fake reviews.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#135

Post by [deleted] »

Proziam wrote: post #64
boyesm wrote: post #62

If you could opt-in to change Amazon and other online retailer's customer aggregated reviews to an authoritative nonpartisan review created by a professional product reviewer, would you do it? Why (not)?

That probably depends on how this nonpartisan reviewer was selected. Are they paid? By whom? By what standard are they considered authoritative?

[deleted]

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#136

Post by zionic »

beckingz wrote: post #84
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…

This happened on Amazon. Outcompeted by another product listing? Buy obviously fake amazon reviews and they would get suspended by Amazon for purchasing fake reviews. I've heard that Amazon is now more nuanced in how they handle suspensions, but it's a mess.

We got an alert from Amazon that if we didn’t stop faking reviews we would be terminated. Given that we have never done so, it was quite a shock to us. I wonder which competitor of ours feels threatened.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#137

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Dyac wrote: post #73
vorpalhex wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a business owner, you only need to claim the review is fraudulant and that will usually get it removed. In theory a review hoster is supposed to evaluate claims and act on reasonable ones. In practice review hosters are terrified of getting sued and will take down reviews easily. I suspect most local businesses hire "reputation fixing" firms to actually do this dirty work for them.

I helped a couple of small businesses set up maps business listings a few years back. One was going great for years then in about 3-4 days got a bunch of fraudulent bad reviews from a disgruntled ex exployee. We tried for months to remove them, every single way possible but were never able to. In the end we had to nuke the whole Google business listing, which wasn't easy either.

You can reply though, IIRC. A good response to a negative review is a massive plus to me.

Aside: somehow businesses get moved - even major ones like a local McDo got moved to the wrong location. Takes weeks for corrections from when I report them. I really can't understand that one. This too could be a killer for a small business, getting shifted to the wrong location.

In a similar vein, I'm forever having to report our opening hours and things to Facebook as we don't have any (small craft shop, open by arrangement) and people insist on adding some.

It's all really weirdly handled. I suppose it's the presence of untrustworthy parties in such disclosures though Google should have enough trust signals to weight users input.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#138

Post by Schweigi »

hayst4ck wrote: post #86
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…

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…

Google Business (business.google.com) which is used for managing a business on Google/Google Maps has surprisingly pretty good customer support (for Google :) ). There is an option to request help and when you decline all the automated answers it's possible to send a text to a real person. Up to now all requests to remove reviews, photos, or previous/old business listings have been resolved in 2-3 business days.

In order to remove a review on Google Business it needs to be fraudulent or outdated - e.g. the business has been remodeled and the review doesn't apply anymore. But the list has over 10 different categories on why a review can be removed. So in reality I would say it's probably possible to remove any review. The customer for Google is the business, not the user as Google is promoting GoogleAds to local businesses so they need to keep them "happy" to increase Ad spend.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#139

Post by pbhjpbhj »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #87
vorpalhex wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a business owner, you only need to claim the review is fraudulant and that will usually get it removed. In theory a review hoster is supposed to evaluate claims and act on reasonable ones. In practice review hosters are terrified of getting sued and will take down reviews easily. I suspect most local businesses hire "reputation fixing" firms to actually do this dirty work for them.

I don't know how to square this claim with the plethora of businesses with many negative reviews on both Google and Yelp. If it were this easy, you'd think everyone would be doing it. Probably someone would have written a blog post describing how to do so. I can find out how to buy gmail accounts on Google, but I can't find out how to remove business reviews. Maybe the claim is just that most small businesses are ver…

I think almost all SME owners would assume they'd have to pay (Yelp model), rather than just be able to lie and say it's fraud. Also who is going to advertise after the fact that they falsely had reviews removed - risking getting dumped by Google?

I'll assume Google's reviews are at least somewhat likely to be biased (either way!) until reason to believe otherwise. The "you don't know the review wasn't posted by a dog" position.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#140

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

That saying has it limits, most pf these excuses are sounding very improbable, like: "oh i didnt mean to rob the place, i found the door unlocked and walked in to give it a good clean."

When motive, money and power align,yet we still accept weak ass excuses?

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