Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a valid SEO tactic as well. You can have crummy back links to your competitor and google will penalize them...
valid dirtbag SEO tactic
Isn't that redundant?
I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
141–150 of 177 posts
Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think Fiverr should hire a team to monitor the activity and authenticity of its sellers. That would cause most of their revenue to evaporate.
They also don't have a "report this post" button anywhere to allow people to flag spam or illegal activity. That would at least be something they could do...
How would that benefit them at all?
Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, it's not something people say in real life, just a funny turn of phrase; "a Benjamin" is the only common use of a president's name for the denomination.
Friendly correction that Benjamin Franklin was not a president, your point stands though.
Hah! Something I even knew. Thanks for the correction. I guess we need to stop calling cash "dead presidents" [1] now.
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dead+presiden...
Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
#144Yelp was the only company that caught us, hiding both of the reviews I bought behind their “not recommended” click wall and not counting them in F.A.K.E.’s rating. It has software that screens out suspicious reviews, not including them in a company’s star-rating. If they see too many of them, they will penalize a business’s page, putting a “consumer alert” on the profile for 90 days warning visitors that they think t…
> Kudos to the Yelp team for keeping the quality control strong and providing a great service. Well that's not something you hear (read) everyday.
I think people looking for reviews generally find Yelp to be useful but business owners often hate them.
Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
#145A karaoke truck kind of sounds like a good idea. Shame it's fake.
I think it even hit the front page of reddit. I remember seeing something about a karaoke truck recently. So maybe somebody should make it real.
Maybe that was part of the marketing this author bought, just not explicitly listed in the article. If you can buy all those other things, why not reddit upvotes too?
Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Kudos to the Yelp team for keeping the quality control strong and providing a great service. Well that's not something you hear (read) everyday.
I think people looking for reviews generally find Yelp to be useful but business owners often hate them.
I make the same observation. My friends that own restaurants often talk about Yelp messing with their reviews and not showing the good ones. Myself, as someone that usually just uses Yelp to find a place to eat, I find it very useful and have no real complaints with the reviews.
Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
#147But who, in this day and age, would trust or hire a new online business that had a page with 0-100 likes? The apparent presumption on seeing under 1k likes or under a few thousand twitter followers is the business is defective. Or forgotten, or no good. The incorrect wisdom of the crowd is that a legit business has a certain number of likes, followers etc, or it looks suspicious For a new local business who is never…
As someone who does not use Facebook or Twitter, I don't give a hoot about how many "likes" or "followers" a business has, any more than I believe in any other marketing campaign. These measurements measure nothing meaningful to me as a potential customer, as this article clearly demonstrates. I've always found it baffling that people even remotely believe online "reviews" written by strangers. I'll turn it around: W…
Personally I agree completely. As someone in tech I find it very difficult to ascribe meaning to a meaningless number. Especially when people "like" things they hate for comedy or irony purposes, or clicked accidentally a few years ago. Reading online reviews is a case of trying to glean a little truth from something everyone should know is being heavily gamed. But they don't.
Amongst the non-tech population there is trust taken from these numbers. People believe those reviews. People seem to believe that a lot of likes is indicative of trust. People used to believe that clicking blue links was good, and so the web used to be a cesspool of adsense sites providing no real information.
Sad fact is it works. Both with the algorithms - more likes gets more random likes from nowhere over time, and with the visitor perceptions. probably only the non-technical ones.
If it's on the web it must be true, right? /s
Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
#148How can we be sure that this article isn't a deep-cover "fake review" for Yelp? It tells a convincing story and manages to throw in Yelp's huge music selection - I mean, its effectiveness at removing fake reviews.
Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Kudos to the Yelp team for keeping the quality control strong and providing a great service. Well that's not something you hear (read) everyday.
I think people looking for reviews generally find Yelp to be useful but business owners often hate them.
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Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation
#150Yelp was the only company that caught us, hiding both of the reviews I bought behind their “not recommended” click wall and not counting them in F.A.K.E.’s rating. It has software that screens out suspicious reviews, not including them in a company’s star-rating. If they see too many of them, they will penalize a business’s page, putting a “consumer alert” on the profile for 90 days warning visitors that they think t…
I draw the exact opposite conclusion: Yelp is selling reviews and need to control their product. Twitter and Facebook aren't selling followers or friends, so they fight fakes... but not too hard, because that isn't their product.
Isn't the conventional wisdom that Yelp is a protection racket?