UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

I gave up on a linear system of rating long time ago. While seemingly technically correct, it never made total sense in real world—and makes less and less of it as customer bases become more diverse.

There are countless individual preferences, weighed arbitrarily by each person. For example, with accommodation, some want casual friendly attitude, others want staff to stay strictly formal, etc. What is minute to me can be a huge deal to you. Rating systems can’t capture reviewer’s background in such a fine detail and control for it in rating calculations. Meanwhile, business owner’s ability to manage prospective guests’ expectations in advance is usually very limited (first, to manage them you must anticipate them, which requires non-trivial experience; second, it’s generally impossible to deny service to someone you suspect might not like your approach without getting a negative review anyway). This applies to dining and other service and to a degree product businesses.

My rating system now is 99% binary. (A) If I am on balance positive and want to support continued existence of a business, I give the service or the product a 5-star review (where I explain why I’m favorable and can note drawbacks that could be subjective or fall outside of business operator’s control). (B) If not, I post no feedback, but I may convey it in person. (C) Only if I’m unhappy about aspects that are definitely under business operator’s control, communication with the operator fails, and I want to warn other customers about important but non-obvious factors they should really know about, am I going to post a negative review. Except for fraud, I try to wait for a while first, because upon reflection those factors can still seem subjective.

Conversing with small business operators contributed to my decision.

On the other hand, when reading reviews, I am comparing the number of reviews to competitors (adjusted for business lifetime, too many or too few is a red flag), see what specifically is complained about in reviews (I want to see complaints about things that don’t matter to me much, perhaps from people with heightened expectations; no complaints at all is a red flag, but so are complaints about real basics if they seem genuine and not made out of spite), and monitor for any signs of artificial positive feedback or listing swaps (immediate red flags).

Of course, I didn't take my own wisdom and signed the lease anyway, thinking "How bad can it be? I bet only really pissy people write these negative reviews anyway." Little did I know that in a year I would be writing my own multiparagraph 1 star review, documenting all the egregious behavior brought on by awful management during my year of suffering in that god forsaken "luxury" apartment, hoping to warn nameless others who might come after me.

Pretty much every single thing I was warned about in those negative reviews came true. So at least for rooting out awful property management companies, I find google reviews very useful if the distribution of the reviews are bimodal between 5 and 1 stars.

>> So in reality I would say it's probably possible to remove any review

No, it is possible to get something removed if it violates Googles policies that are designed to make sure reviews are on topic and legitimate.

>> 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.

Not true at all. I have personally told many clients who spent XXX million dollars with Google that reviews can not be touched if they follow Google policies. The customer is not the business, it is the users who trust these reviews. Google can do just fine without monetizing the reviews but will not survive without user trust. It will take 2 hours to become a global headline if Google did something like this. And if this was true no business would every have bad reviews.