There have always been fake reviews from employees and competitors. However the emergence of greater review volume and transparency on sites like Yelp has helped to combat what might be called “review fraud.” However with the increasing importance of online reputation to consumers and the potential influence on rankings that reviews bring the stakes are higher than ever. Hence the emergence of services that will guarantee positive reviews.
I was alerted to this, for example:
The third paid link for the query “reputation management” is a service that allows businesses to buy positive reviews: reputation management experts.
The copy reads “positive review packages.” I don’t know this but my guess is that somewhere in some room (perhaps offshore) there are minions writing positive reviews without ever having actually used the business or visited its location.
Google recently revised its review guidelines to try and minimize improper and paid reviews:
Conflict of interest
Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased. Even if well-intentioned, a conflict of interest can undermine the trust in a review. For instance, do not offer or accept money or product to write positive reviews about a business, or to write negative reviews about a competitor. Please also do not post reviews on behalf of others or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with the place you are reviewing.
As the person who alerted me to the site above said, paid reviews and review fraud is the new black hat SEO.
March 7th, 2011 at 4:25 pm
I like the Black Hat analogy.
However, I do think there is a class of legitimate behavior that is being lumped together with this behavior and labeled “review fraud”. To that end, I’d suggest we start talking about the label “testimonials” to represent the class of REAL USER reviews that have been requested or sponsored by the business. This can then be interpreted in the right context by other consumers, and can be collected appropriately (or ignored) by aggregators.
Perhaps this would help identify and isolate/separate business behavior to bring a spotlight on the opinion of happy customers, without is being viewed as fraud, or tagged as independent.
What do you think?
March 7th, 2011 at 4:25 pm
No doubt this is happening and a problem. Systems that allow users to build profiles and trust over time will weed this stuff out and make it easy to identify fraud. Unfortunately, that won’t help combat the SEO problem for legitimate sites that compete against this noise. It’s the same kind of complaint issued by news sites against content farms. Google’s in a pinch. Block this stuff = anti-trust. Don’t block it = bad user experience.
March 7th, 2011 at 4:35 pm
SEMs, SEOs and other online marketers have all understood that reviews, review sites, ratings, star ratings and similar methods of identifying who is a good company and who is a bad company has always been at best, very misleading. Lets just take a look at human nature. People complain more than they acclaim. One irked consumer will post to 20 sites a hundred negative comments over a $10 mistake. Yet a satisfied consumer will rarely post anything at all.
Besides this, the “open” rating model has always been easy pickings spammers. Digg, Sphinn, and other sites where content is pushed to the top based on some form of “impartial” valuation system have all met with failure. These models have been abused so badly by savvy and agressive promoters that they have had to move away from their valuation system. That is why the likes of MojoLocal, Yelp, Kudzu, Yellowpages, Angies list and others that rely on “open” reviews will not succeeed over the long haul.
March 7th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Greg,
I think Perry’s correct that there’s a tendency to paint with too broad a brush on this stuff.
Yelp is actually the prime example of this. They specifically preach against any kind of review incentive yet allow merchants to offer specials and coupons through their system.
A great example is the guy who actually uses his Yelp profile in his Google Places page as his web address, offering free frozen yogurt next door for patrons. Right now he’s offering a free lip balm (I would bet it’s Yelp branded).
http://www.google.com/search?q=park+slope+eye+doctor
No, he’s not offering an incentive for a review, but yes, he’s incentivizing the behavior by making a special offer to the review prone.
Again, Yelp – and others I’m sure – are on the wrong side of this argument with their advertiser behavior.
March 7th, 2011 at 4:49 pm
… because that’s why you buy advertising.
March 7th, 2011 at 4:54 pm
There are a couple of levels here:
1. Who wrote the review?
2. Was the review bought by some incentive?
I agree that testimonials and properly solicited reviews are fine. However a problem arises with paid-for reviews and certainly those who are written by people in the Philippines who’ve never been to the business.
March 7th, 2011 at 4:57 pm
I think the best review site is Amazon with very insightful and detailed reviews. Other reviews on different sites seem to be all over the place in terms of quality and honesty.
March 7th, 2011 at 4:59 pm
I like Amazon’s presentation of reviews. However Amazon has also had its review scandals — specifically around authors “dissing” others’ books and writing positive reviews about their own. This was several years ago.
March 7th, 2011 at 5:22 pm
My two cents: Google, Yelp, Amazon, etc. need to build trust into their platforms so that by default users only see reviews they can trust. That trust comes in three forms: 1) Users I know; 2) Users I don’t know who I have explicitly elected to “follow” because they like/dislike the same things I do; 3) Users I don’t know but who are (algorithmically) “like me”.
The review platforms need to provide simple tools that auto-suggest trusted users and allow users to curate their circle of trust with nominal effort.
Note that in (1) trust doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with the reviewer’s opinion – rather that you know the source and can weight the opinion accordingly.
March 7th, 2011 at 6:12 pm
My positive reviews are cheaper
All you have to do is offer an amazing service that makes me think when I leave… WOW I really want to write a positive review about this place!
Now for the true problem when it comes to the review game. A lot of the directories include the amount of reviews and the star rating as part of their ranking algo….
This means it will be gamed. So, initially you have people who fake reviews and get great rankings through sites like mentioned above. Their businesses flourish because those outsourcers sure now how to write a postive review.
So, then a good business says, well I am not going to fall behind so the only way for me to get reviews is to give a discount or some offer to get people to leave reviews, and then they catch up and feel great because their reviews came from real customers and those it took tons more work and effort, they are competitive in the review space.
Last but not least is the companies who actually read the guidelines to yelp, google, etc and say, “I am going to add review links on my site and I will ask my customers to leave a review but I wont offer anything in return.” The sad thing is these are the companies that largely fall in last place because directories are still far off catching the bulk of review spam. So they struggle to get the quantity and star rating needed even though they tend to be the true blue ones that should do the best.
I don’t know how practical this is, but the day that reviews don’t effect rankings becomes the day when real reviews will win. Until then, the review space will continue to be a big fat hairy joke.
March 7th, 2011 at 6:56 pm
I know I’m a broken record sometimes but our company has always worked with our retailer clients to send emails to their customers. When a user uses that email to write a review, then that review is marked as having come from a Verified Buyer.
It’s different from Amazon’s Real Name but perhaps more important since consumer reviews are prized for their actual use of product versus experts who evaluate but usually don’t use products in an everyday fashion.
Remember that in the product review space, most people don’t buy multiple cameras, fridges, basketball hoops, etc. so following a given reviewer can be tough if you’re waiting for them to buy multiples of the same category of product. That, said, certain categories like shoes, clothing, and books are more consumable.
You can see these Verified Buyer badges on our retailers’ sites (my company is PowerReviews) and on our consumer-facing site, Buzzillions.com.
March 7th, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Jim, you are correct most people do not buy multiple cameras, computers and so on. However, if you look at best buy ratings you see a lot of reviews that are a week old… okay you’ve had the PC for a week and you love it. After somebody pulls the trigger and makes a purchase they often have the need to justify the purchase as being the right choice. Others are inept and can’t figure out how to turn on the PC and write poor reviews. Again, review systems are a tricky game, you either have people gaming the system, or you have reviews based on a shaky foundation of psychological behaviors and not straight up critical thinking. I liked what one previous poster suggested. Let the consumer decide where they get the review/advice from. 3 options- reviews from peers of their choice, experts of their choice, or an algo generated ranking.
March 8th, 2011 at 3:07 pm
Hmm…shouldn’t a testimonial be an accepted way for a customer/client to show their support for your site/products/services? We buy into that premise and have always (more’n 11 years) tried to get our SEO clients to get same.
But this new “purchase-a-review” type of methodology bothers us – like it does others above…and I also wonder at the “heft” of such a campaign…at the pricing offered it appears to be an offshore sweatshop doing the work and that’s worrisome too IMHO. Us? Not a chance…you just can’t buy truth in our book, eh!
Jim
March 8th, 2011 at 7:38 pm
Remember it was just very recently when Google used a reaper on it’s own organic reviews within the Places pages….. reviews written by a profile that was created and on the same day posted a review but was never logged into again. Google must have determined that those reviews were spammy and if a couple of legitimate ones were wiped out to clean out the core problem (spammy Usernames and reviews) then so be it. I can easily see some of the top producing IYPs being squeezed into analyzing it’s own reviews and following the same process (though very much against their will).
I find it very hard to believe that Google has not placed paid review writers as a banned list of categories to advertise under in Adwords. One has a serious issue trying to get a Airsoft campaign up and going but it’s ok to advertise a paid spam company? Look for that to shift as well.
Amazing that they go after JC Penney and Overstock (esp) when they have clear examples of businesses advertising on Google stating that they will write spam reviews…the same reviews Google is looking to keep out of Google Places.
March 10th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
Please note that the reputation site you make reference to is a scam. Do a search on the phone number and you will discover that number is connected to 5 or more identical type sites, all with complaints against them from people who were scammed after paying for their “reputation services”. Seeing those sites can’t protect their own reputation you should take what they offer with a grain of salt.
March 10th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Yes, that’s the whole point of the article — that it’s a scam.
March 10th, 2011 at 4:23 pm
Then look for the “reputation services” and “paid reviews” industries to experience compound annual growth.
March 10th, 2011 at 5:31 pm
It works. The only way to fix it is to stop making it work. Too bad 3% with a good experience will writer a review and 30+% with a negative will do the same. I personally think that it is unethical to fabricate reviews and for competitors to create negative reviews. My companies only negative review is from another SEO -hater….
This is still not a great ranking signal in my honest opinion. it should be a means of sharing and liking. If Google swapped out reviews or used Facebook reviews as a strong signal and also looked at the age and history of the facebook accounts, this would work much better than anonymous reviews posted under false Google accounts or funnelled from local review sites. How can authentication be a factor? Why not use and post phone number verification to see who is doing them. Creating additional hurtles will push out the spammers and curate from the evangelists and advocates. Too many ideas for improvement. Lets get to work Google!
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