UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews • Hacker News Board

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#161

Post by williamchangnpu » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #153

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…

>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 whic…

Yep, today when I type anything into the search box, most of the time the result is highly "SEO"ed result by media and agencies, unlike the old days

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#162

Post by jxramos » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

There were a few google reviews for a service I recently used that I wondered about...

    Response from the owner
    This is spam and I reported it to google

There were a handful of those review responses. Made me wonder if spam features could be abused to mask bad reviews. I think at least in Yelp you can still see the data right?

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#163

Post by IncRnd » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 2:07 AM UTC

throwaway_1301 wrote: post #122

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.

Absolutely not true. Worked on this team for Google at one point and other than internal systems nothing can get reviews removed. Firms cant do anything, they are just swindling people out of money. Some of them will get fake reviews to try and drown out negative ones but its very short lived.

Yet, reviews can be removed :).

Reviews can be removed if they are shown to violate Google policies. Also, legal action can be taken to remove a review. Google does not write law about what reviews are permanent.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#164

Post by 3np » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 2:11 AM UTC

schnevets wrote: post #58

I'm surprised more of these comments aren't focused on how glaringly flawed the 5-star democratic rating system has become. I felt like the rise of Uber made it abundantly clear that anything less than a 5.0 means you were not satisfied with the service and don't think the business should continue.

This drives me nuts. Im operating under the assumption of a linear distribution. 4/5 still means in the 80th percentile. It’s better than average. 3/5 is “not amazing, not bad, what I would expect, an utterly normal experience”.

In some platforms I am happy with everything, leaving a 4, getting the follow up question “what went wrong?”

Nothing went wrong, they still exceeded expectations but I reserve my 5s for those “once in a year, best in class” experiences. I refuse to shift my MO to “less than 4 means something was bad”.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#165

Post by zaphirplane » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 2:14 AM UTC

donaldo wrote: post #43

ipsum2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam. Do you have any evidence of this claim? Have you seen businesses be able to do that? Surely, the hundreds of thousands of businesses on Google, one of them has talked about the ability to remove reviews.

Yeah agreed. Do they think Google just has some checkout button to block bad reviews for $299.

Of course not, you need to be logged in to a google account and solve a captcha ;)

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#166

Post by fairity » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:11 AM UTC

3np wrote: post #164

schnevets wrote: post #58

I'm surprised more of these comments aren't focused on how glaringly flawed the 5-star democratic rating system has become. I felt like the rise of Uber made it abundantly clear that anything less than a 5.0 means you were not satisfied with the service and don't think the business should continue.

This drives me nuts. Im operating under the assumption of a linear distribution. 4/5 still means in the 80th percentile. It’s better than average. 3/5 is “not amazing, not bad, what I would expect, an utterly normal experience”. In some platforms I am happy with everything, leaving a 4, getting the follow up question “what went wrong?” Nothing went wrong, they still exceeded expectations but I reserve my 5s for those…

Why not adjust your ratings to fit the prevailing perception? Presumably the reason you're leaving reviews is not for yourself, but to help others, be it the business or future customers. To that end, it seems an adjustment is in order.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#167

Post by hc-taway » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:11 AM UTC

williamchangnpu wrote: post #161

harry8 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 whic…

Yep, today when I type anything into the search box, most of the time the result is highly "SEO"ed result by media and agencies, unlike the old days

Around ‘08 or ‘09 they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and decided webspam could rank highly as long as it didn’t get too nasty. The whole web (as far as searches results will tell you) promptly turned into webspam. I imagine this, along with their plainly-evil inlining of ads with search results within a couple years of that, made their profit arrow go up-and-to-the-right so hard that no-one who opposed those moves was paid any mind.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#168

Post by SilverRed » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:15 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #106

Laremere wrote: post #52

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?

Its almost certainly an anti spam system. The system marked the review as spam, for whatever reason. And it doesn't publish the results. The system doesn't tell you this because otherwise the first thing you will do is keep trying again in different ways until it doesn't tell you it was marked as spam.

Google drops reviews for a few known reasons. When a location gets negative coverage in the news, thousands of negative reviews from people who have never visited the location. Google then drops the reviews since review bombing is not useful.

Who knows why OPs comment was flagged, but its easy to see how this happens without a big conspiracy going on.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#169

Post by SilverRed » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:18 AM UTC

the-pigeon wrote: post #159

zionic wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pu…

None of these limitations work. There are facebook and IM groups set up where real users of Amazon sit and companies offer free products to these people for good reviews.

These users have years of real account history and they really did buy the product. Its just on an external service, the seller refunds the money.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#170

Post by wyqydsyq » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

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…

Yeah I just don't see this being a thing either. If Google allowed businesses to pay to moderate (i.e. censor) their own reviews at their own will then that destroys any legitimacy in the reviews of a business, eliminating any value of Google Maps reviews to the end-customer and killing the product.