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UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

bbc.com

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Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#121

Post by throwaway_1301 »

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 millions a year that does not change our policies. One of the luxuries of being Google scale I guess.

Google gets a lot of (potentially justified) criticism on Hackernews but this conspiracy that Google lets businesses pay for reviews is plain stupid.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#122

Post by throwaway_1301 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #68
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#123

Post by dang »

trollski wrote: post #94
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…

it's like commenting on hackernews for me. which you will never hear about.

It's not, because:

(1) Anyone can easily see why you're banned, if they want to turn 'showdead' on in their profile and look at https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=trollski ;

(2) Anyone can easily get an answer about why they're banned on HN, simply by asking us;

(3) Anyone can easily get themselves unbanned on HN if they want to use the site in the intended spirit as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#124

Post by tasssko »

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 a really bad review i weigh it for much less than i used to especially if it lacks all the necessary components of a review. Does anyone else do this? Have you noticed that some reviews just look the same even the bad ones?

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#125

Post by luigeus »

Unfortunately, the companies doing this gain advantage for their apparent excellent service but often provide a poor customer experience. It just raises people's expectations which will not be satisfied and create the false idea that their competitors must be worse for their lower rating. This whole problem is damaging the market.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#126

Post by qwerty456127 »

Today business is all about reviews and search results. You need to be in the top of your segment and have good reviews. You have to manipulate the reviews this or that way and have a budget for that.

As a customer - just don't take reviews too serious.

I personally also prefer to avoid the very top and always take a look at subsequent pages of search results, also results from alternative search engines when I'm looking for a company to hire.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#127

Post by wyldfire »

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…

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.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#128

Post by ghoward »

alert0 wrote: post #109
ghoward wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great reply to my post and answers me better than any of the others I have seen thus far.

Any curse words or something that a system might flag?

No, I actually do not swear at all.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#129

Post by osrec »

wyldfire wrote: post #127
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…

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.

Re: UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews

#130

Post by ghoward »

ggggtez wrote: post #120
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…

Here is my reading of your situation: 1) You posted a review which presumably got flagged as being spam/low-quality (maybe an automated system flagged it for having ALL CAPS or curse words, or who knows what). 2) You posted the same review on a different account, which now is flagged as double spam because now it looks like you are operating a sock-puppet account. I think my version of events sounds a lot more likely…

Mine probably got flagged, but not because of curse words or ALL CAPS because, as far as I remember, it didn't have either of them.

Edit: I just checked, and the name of the business, which I quoted in my review, is ALL CAPS, so maybe that was it?

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