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UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

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211–220 of 232 posts

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#211
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is the prevailing perception helpful to anyone ?

The scale he uses makes sense and honestly due to the boatloads of useless (or fake) reviews i'm much more likely to take anything below 5 seriously or look at em quicker because it's there that I expect people that properly point out how it was good but what could be better at like a 4 (perfection is rare) and how the service or product failed them at like a 1 or 2. (Tho I take into account that there's always shitheads and karens)

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#212
I remember when Google started requiring reviewers to publish their real names, 10 or 12 years ago (slightly before the concerted push behind Google+). I’m pretty sure the review quality was better back then, though probably only because the scammers and spammers hadn’t yet flooded the system.

You might think non-pseudonymous reviews would at least offer some protection against fake reviews, but it doesn’t seem to have helped in the slightest.

The other thing that annoys me is that nobody seems to be doing any kind of normalisation or calibration of ratings -- we just get simple average ratings, maybe with outliers filtered out.

Whatever happened to all the ratings algorithms that were developed for the Netflix Prize? That seemed like important work at the time, but it seems to have almost completely ignored.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#213

My personal experience as a business owner. We do not care about reviews since we are a B2B software house. Our customers are mid- to large-size companies so they do not play reviews but lawyers if our service wasn't of highest quality :) My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them. Anyway - no customer gave us any review o…

Imagine you operate in an industry where these reviews are not permitted. You have your regulator telling you to remove them with no means of actually achieving that.

I saw this first-hand in finance. They ended up "disavowing" the listings so they had no control over them. Now the individual offices can't set their hours, but I guess it made compliance happy.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened with normal search, Google punished companies for spam links to their websites which caused sites to pay for bad links to their competition to raise their relative ranking.. It's now necessary for everyone to review links to their site and disown them.

I created a small one-off blog a while ago for a single hiking trip I made, and as you might imagine, I link to several product sites for the equipment I use - plain ol' links, not affiliated or anything. I got an email out of the blue one day from a product company asking me to remove a link. I did so, but I never really understood why a company would reduce business opportunity (however minute) by asking me to do t…

I’m not into SEO but I wonder if this type of thing can make a blog look like a sock puppet blog of sorts and thus impact google ranking??!

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I've found it almost impossible to remove bad reviews on Google. We've had several drive-by 1 star reviews from people in different countries that have zero relation to our business.

It's even hard to get 5 * reviews removed. They aren't allowed for consumer finance co's in Canada but we still couldn't get them removed.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#216

My personal experience as a business owner. We do not care about reviews since we are a B2B software house. Our customers are mid- to large-size companies so they do not play reviews but lawyers if our service wasn't of highest quality :) My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them. Anyway - no customer gave us any review o…

> We were forced to play by the rules and we bought 50 reviews to paint our wall.

Is dishonesty really the solution here? I would have thought the first port of call is get the employees that do like working you (you do have them?) to give their honest opinions on Google too, diluting the effect of one review.

Buying reviews (50 of them) to drown out a valid review from disgruntled employee doesn't seem ethical. This is where it gets grey: was it a valid review, or did the ex-employee make stuff up?

I'm shocked that Google would remove negative reviews if there were more positive ones. That is a very compelling reason to buy fake reviews, on Amazon, Google, or anywhere.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#217

My personal experience as a business owner. We do not care about reviews since we are a B2B software house. Our customers are mid- to large-size companies so they do not play reviews but lawyers if our service wasn't of highest quality :) My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them. Anyway - no customer gave us any review o…

> My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them.

I like the fact that there's a third party controlling reviews, not the company itself. We all know how legit those Testimonials on websites are... I agree that it can have a bad effect, fake reviews are bad, but better than only fake reviews hosted by the company they're about.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#218
This sucks for customers but as a business owner it's pretty rational behavior. If everyone is going to judge your business based on some 3rd-party rating and someone offers to boost that rating for you for a few hundred dollars ... you have to be very confident and moral to say no.

As a consumer I am conscious of how often I choose a particular restaurant because it has many high-star Google ratings. In a big city the difference between 4.0 stars (100 ratings) and 4.3 stars (700 ratings) is probably tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#219
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said they had money for PR but probably not infinite amounts to take on Google at court.

I don't know where the idea that taking Google to court would cost you infinite amount of money comes from. First you get your lawyer to just write a letter stating clearly what's wrong, and what action you're aiming to take by which point. Keep it reasonable. Have the lawyer point out exactly which point of their own TCs they are breaking and set a date by which you will initiate legal proceedings if they don't resp…

Yes, also in general in a legal dispute you can make it very clear at the start what you would accept to resolve the matter. So if you end up going to court or otherwise running up large legal fees, at the end of the process you can point to the earlier communication and say 'We would have settled this matter quickly and cheaply at the start, for the same or less than what we have got now. Therefore Google should have to cover our fees.'

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#220

My personal experience as a business owner. We do not care about reviews since we are a B2B software house. Our customers are mid- to large-size companies so they do not play reviews but lawyers if our service wasn't of highest quality :) My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them. Anyway - no customer gave us any review o…

> My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them. I like the fact that there's a third party controlling reviews, not the company itself. We all know how legit those Testimonials on websites are... I agree that it can have a bad effect, fake reviews are bad, but better than only fake reviews hosted by the company they're about…

The proof is in the pudding, and unfortunately Google is not proving any more reliable than asking a random alcoholic that happens to be nearby
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