Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
151–160 of 232 posts
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#152I 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'm not sure if Google does it indirectly, but they definitely do this practice with their "partners" (probably just a convenient way to shift liability of more shady practices) to review partners like Trustpilot (I get their sales calls all the time, so I know what benefits they offer to businesses in terms of "moderating" reviews).
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#153I 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 knows its bread and butter is legitimate results
My feeling is that google have paid only lip service to that for more than a decade now? Ads are now much, much more important due to lack of meaningful search competition.
Remember ads used to be clearly separate from search results? That's a long time ago. Google make a load of money selling $company the first hit for the search string with $company_name which is an ad so $company_competition can't steal their search result. Then take the cash when the person searching for $company clicks the first link that comes up when they search for company. That's closer to protection rackets and stand-over tactics than focus on a bread-and-butter of legit search results.
That's just one example of modern google. Remember "I'm feeling lucky?" Quite the contrast nowadays isn't it. Unrecognizably different in the google approach. But also it's difficult to take a legitimate result focus seriously if you've ever done a google search on a phone. Try it.
Google are really happy to get any bidding war for advertising content going and have such a dominant position they don't care at all what you think about it. This particular suggestion of what they might be doing? I dunno. It'll probably leak if it's true. It is completely and totally consistent with modern google.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#154Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does "stupidity" explain that the poster's account showed the review but someone else's account didn't?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning
Right, but you don't accidentally shadow-ban someone, you first have to create the whole system to do so... So they weren't 'stupid'.
It obviously was intentional to lie to the user. We're just discussing the line at which intentional lies for selfish reasons can be called malicious.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 do…
I don't really care if you assume the reviews are biased. I assume that all review websites have some number of fake reviews, and it's unlikely that exactly half of the fake reviews are negative and the other half positive. Therefore all review websites would have some bias vs the ground truth sentiment. My only objection is to baseless accusations of malfeasance.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#157> Google says it has "significantly" invested in tech to tackle the issue.
Hope it's better then the same "tech" that locks people out of their accounts.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
If many companies are doing it, and many are forced (or feel forced) to do it in order to compete, then it isn't fair to just single one or two of them for public shaming via a publicly funded broadcaster. There's also libel ... maybe the threshold of evidence is high enough to write an article about some unnamed company buying reviews, but not high enough to hold up in court.
> If many companies are doing it, and many are forced (or feel forced) to do it in order to compete, then it isn't fair to just single one or two of them for public shaming via a publicly funded broadcaster. Sorry but if you're doing shady shit, it's no defence that everyone else is doing it too.
If everybody is doing it, it is known, and Google doesn't address it, what do you do as a business? Sue Google, who certainly has a "no warranty" clause in their ToS about reviews? No, of course you buy fake reviews too. I have trouble blaming them here. Losing customers for the sake of your sense of righteousness helps no one.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The other than that may be happening is bots building legitimacy.
Like if you want to boost your product with 1,000 fake reviews then you need 1,000 accounts that don't look like bots. Meaning they need to do a lot of different activities so they have a behavior pattern that looks like a real person. Which would include posting other fake reviews.
Of course in Amazon's case they could just require accounts to have purchased the item in question on Amazon to review it. But they must prefer more reviews to making it harder to manipulate reviews using bots.
Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews
#160I 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…
Indenting your text formats it as code, making it unteadable.