It’s 105 degrees outside my office right now, and the only thing hotter in this summer of 2017 is the local SEO industry’s discussion of review spam. It’s become increasingly clear that major review sites represent an irresistible temptation to spammers, highlighting systemic platform weaknesses and the critical need for review monitoring that scales.
Just as every local brand, large and small, has had to adjust to the reality of reviews’ substantial impact on modern consumer behavior, competitive businesses must now prepare themselves to manage the facts of fraudulent sentiment. Equip your team and clients with this article, which will cover every aspect of review spam and includes a handy list for reporting fake reviews to major platforms.
What is review spam?
A false review is one that misrepresents either the relationship of the reviewer to the business, misrepresents the nature of the interaction the reviewer had with the business, or breaks a guideline. Examples:
- The reviewer is actually a competitor of the business he is reviewing; he’s writing the review to hurt a competitor and help himself
- The reviewer is actually the owner, an employee, or a marketer of the business he is reviewing; he’s falsifying a review to manipulate public opinion via fictitious positive sentiment
- The reviewer never had a transaction with the business he is reviewing; he’s pretending he’s a customer in order to help/hurt the business
- The reviewer had a transaction, but is lying about the details of it; he’s trying to hurt the company by misrepresenting facts for some gain of his own
- The reviewer received an incentive to write the review, monetary or otherwise; his sentiment stems from a form of reward and is therefore biased
- The reviewer violates any of the guidelines on the platform on which he’s writing his review; this could include personal attacks, hate speech or advertising
All of the above practices are forbidden by the major review platforms and should result in the review being reported and removed.
What isn’t review spam?
A review is not spam if:
- It’s left directly by a genuine customer who experienced a transaction
- It represents the facts of a transaction with reasonable, though subjective, accuracy
- It adheres to the policies of the platform on which it’s published
Reviews that contain negative (but accurate) consumer sentiment shouldn’t be viewed as spam. For example, it may be embarrassing to a brand to see a consumer complain that an order was filled incorrectly, that an item was cold, that a tab was miscalculated or that a table was dirty, but if the customer is correctly cataloging his negative experience, then his review isn’t a misrepresentation.
There’s some inherent complexity here, as the brand and the consumer can differ widely in their beliefs about how satisfying a transaction may have been. A restaurant franchise may believe that its meals are priced fairly, but a consumer can label them as too expensive. Negative sentiment can be subjective, so unless the reviewer is deliberately misrepresenting facts and the business can prove it, it’s not useful to report this type of review as spam as it’s unlikely to be removed.
Why do individuals and businesses write spam reviews?
Unfortunately, the motives can be as unpleasant as they are multitudinous:
Blackmail/extortion
There’s the case of the diner who was filmed putting her own hair in her food in hopes of extorting a free meal under threat of negative reviews as a form of blackmail. And then there’s blackmail as a business model, as this unfortunate business reported to the GMB forum after being bulk-spammed with 1-star reviews and then contacted by the spammer with a demand for money to raise the ratings to 5-stars.
Revenge
The classic case is the former employee of a business venting his frustrations by posing as a customer to leave a highly negative review. There are also numerous instances of unhappy personal relationships leading to fake negative reviews of businesses.
Protest or punishment
Consumer sentiment may sometimes appear en masse as a form of protest against an individual or institution, as the US recently witnessed following the election of President Trump and the ensuing avalanche of spam reviews his various businesses received.
It should be noted here that attempting to shame a business with fake negative reviews can have the (likely undesirable) effect of rewarding it with high local rankings, based on the sheer number of reviews it receives. We saw this outcome in the infamous case of the dentist who made national news and received an onslaught of shaming reviews for killing a lion.
Finally, there is the toxic reviewer, a form of Internet troll who may be an actual customer but whose personality leads them to write abusive or libelous reviews as a matter of course. While these reviews should definitely be reported and removed if they fail to meet guidelines, discussion is open and ongoing in the local SEO industry as to how to manage the reality of consumers of this type.
Ranking manipulation
The total review count of a business (regardless of the sentiment the reviews contain) can positively impact Google’s local pack rankings or the internal rankings of certain review platforms. For the sake of boosting rankings, some businesses owners review themselves, tell their employees to review their employer, offer incentives to others in exchange for reviews, or even engage marketers to hook them up to a network of review spammers.
Public perception manipulation
This is a two-sided coin. A business can either positively review itself or negatively review its competitors in an effort to sway consumer perception. The latter is a particularly prevalent form of review spam, with the GMB forum overflowing with at least 10,000 discussions of this topic. Given that respected surveys indicate that 91% of consumers now read online reviews, 84% trust them as much as personal recommendations and 86% will hesitate to patronize a business with negative reviews, the motives for gaming online sentiment, either positively or negatively, are exceedingly strong.
Wages
Expert local SEO, Mike Blumenthal, is currently doing groundbreaking work uncovering a global review spam network that’s responsible for tens or hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. In this scenario, spammers are apparently employed to write reviews of businesses around the world depicting sets of transactions that not even the most jet-setting globetrotter could possibly have experienced. As Mike describes one such reviewer:
“She will, of course, be educated at the mortuary school in Illinois and will have visited a dentist in Austin after having reviewed four other dentists ... Oh, and then she will have bought her engagement ring in Israel, and then searched out a private investigator in Kuru, Philippines eight months later to find her missing husband. And all of this has taken place in the period of a year, right?”
The scale of this network makes it clear that review spam has become big business.
Lack of awareness
Not all review spammers are dastardly characters. Some small-timers are only guilty of a lack of awareness of guidelines or a lack of foresight about the potential negative outcomes of fake reviews to their brand. I’ve sometimes heard small local business owners state they had their family review their newly-opened business to “get the ball rolling,” not realizing that they were breaking a guideline and not considering how embarrassing and costly it could prove if consumers or the platform catch on. In this scenario, I try to teach that faking success is not a viable business model — you have to earn it.
Lack of consequences
Unfortunately, some of the most visible and powerful review platforms have become enablers of the review spam industry due to a lack of guideline enforcement. When a platform fails to identify and remove fake reviews, either because of algorithmic weaknesses or insufficient support staffing, spammers are encouraged to run amok in an environment devoid of consequences. For unethical parties, no further justification for manipulating online sentiment is needed than that they can “get away with it.” Ironically, there are consequences to bear for lack of adequate policing, and until they fall on the spammer, they will fall on any platform whose content becomes labeled as untrustworthy in the eyes of consumers.
What is the scope of review spam?
No one knows for sure, but as we’ve seen, the playing field ranges from the single business owner having his family write a couple of reviews on Yelp to the global network employing staff to inundate Google with hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. And, we’ve see two sides to the review spam environment:
- People who write reviews to help themselves (in terms of positive rankings, perception, and earnings for themselves either directly from increased visibility or indirectly via extortion, and/or in terms of negative outcomes for competitors).
- People who write reviews to hurt others (for the sake of revenge with little or no consequence).
The unifying motive of all forms of review spam is manipulation, creating an unfair and untrustworthy playing field for consumers, enterprises and platforms alike. One Harvard study suggests that 20% of Yelp reviews are fake, but it would be up to the major review platforms to transparently publicize the total number of spam reviews they receive. Just the segment I’ve seen as an individual local SEO has convinced me that review spam has now become an industry, just like “black hat” SEO once did.
How to spot spam reviews
Here are some basic tips:
Strange patterns:
A reviewer’s profile indicates that they’ve been in too many geographic locations at once. Or, they have a habit of giving 1-star reviews to one business and 5-star reviews to its direct competitor. While neither is proof positive of spam, think of these as possible red flags.
Strange language:
Numerous 5-star reviews that fawn on the business owner by name (e.g. “Bill is the greatest man ever to walk the earth”) may be fishy. If adulation seems to be going overboard, pay attention.
Strange timing:
Over the course of a few weeks, a business skyrockets from zero reviews to 30, 50, or 100 of them. Unless an onslaught of sentiment stems from something major happening in the national news, chances are good the company has launched some kind of program. If you suspect spam, you’ll need to research whether the reviews seem natural or could be stemming from some form of compensation.
Strange numbers:
The sheer number of reviews a business has earned seems inconsistent with its geography or industry. Some business models (restaurants) legitimately earn hundreds of reviews each year on a given platform, but others (mortuaries) are unlikely to have the same pattern. If a competitor of yours has 5x as many reviews as seems normal for your geo-industry, it could be a first indicator of spam.
Strange "facts":
None of your staff can recall that a transaction matching the description in a negative review ever took place, or a transaction can be remembered but the way the reviewer is presenting it is demonstrably false. Example: a guest claims you rudely refused to seat him, but your in-store cam proves that he simply chose not to wait in line like other patrons.
Obvious threats:
If any individual or entity threatens your company with a negative review to extort freebies or money from you, take it seriously and document everything you can.
Obvious guideline violations:
Virtually every major review platform prohibits profane, obscene, and hateful content. If your brand is victimized by this type of attack, definitely report it.
In a nutshell, the first step to spotting review spam is review monitoring. You’ll want to manually check direct competitors for peculiar patterns, and, more importantly, all local businesses must have a schedule for regularly checking their own incoming sentiment. For larger enterprises and multi-location business models, this process must be scaled to minimize manual workloads and cover all bases.
Scaling review management
On an average day, one Moz Local customer with 100 retail locations in the U.S. receives 20 reviews across the various platforms we track. Some are just ratings, but many feature text. Many are very positive. A few contain concerns or complaints that must be quickly addressed to protect reputation/budget by taking action to satisfy and retain an existing customer while proving responsiveness to the general consumer public. Some could turn out to be spam.
Over the course of an average week for this national brand, 100–120 such reviews will come in, totaling up to more than 400 pieces of customer feedback in a month that must be assessed for signs of success at specific locations or emerging quality control issues at others. Parse this out to a year’s time, and this company must be prepared to receive and manage close to 5,000 consumer inputs in the form of reviews and ratings, not just for positive and negative sentiment, but for the purposes of detecting spam.
Spam detection starts with awareness, which can only come from the ability to track and audit a large volume of reviews to identify some of the suspicious hallmarks we’ve covered above. At the multi-location or enterprise level, the solution to this lies in acquiring review monitoring software and putting it in the hands of a designated department or staffer. Using a product like Moz Local, monitoring and detection of questionable reviews can be scaled to meet the needs of even the largest brands.
What should your business do if it has been victimized by review spam?
Once you’ve become reasonably certain that a review or a body of reviews violates the guidelines of a specific platform, it’s time to act. The following list contains links to the policies of 7 dominant review platforms that are applicable to all industries, and also contains tips and links outlining reporting options:
Google
Policy: https://support.google.com/business/answer/2622994?hl=en
Review reporting tips
Flag the review by mousing over it, clicking the flag symbol that appears and then entering your email address and choosing a radio button. If you’re the owner, use the owner response function to mention that you’ve reported the review to Google for guideline violations. Then, contact GMB support via their Twitter account and/or post your case in the GMB forum to ask for additional help. Cross your fingers!
Yelp
Policy: https://www.yelp.com/guidelines
Review reporting tips
Yelp offers these guidelines for reporting reviews and also advises owners to respond to reviews that violate guidelines. Yelp takes review quality seriously and has set high standards other platforms might do well to follow, in terms of catching spammers and warning the public against bad actors.
Facebook
Policy: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards
Review reporting tips
Here are Facebook’s instructions for reporting reviews that fail to meet community standards. Note that you can only report reviews with text — you can’t report solo ratings. Interestingly, you can turn off reviews on Facebook, but to do so out of fear would be to forego the considerable benefits they can provide.
Yellow Pages
Policy: https://www.yellowpages.com/about/legal/terms-conditions#user-generated-content
Review reporting tips
In 2016, YP.com began showing TripAdvisor reviews alongside internal reviews. If review spam stems from a YP review, click the “Flag” link in the lower right corner of the review and fill out the form to report your reasons for flagging. If the review spam stems from TripAdvisor, you’ll need to deal with them directly and read their extensive guidelines, TripAdvisor states that they screen reviews for quality purposes, but that fake reviews can slip through. If you’re the owner, you can report fraudulent reviews from the Management Center of your TripAdvisor dashboard. Click the “concerned about a review” link and fill out the form. If you’re simply a member of the public, you’ll need to sign into TripAdvisor and click the flag link next to the review to report a concern.
SuperPages
Policy: https://my.dexmedia.com/spportal/jsp/popups/businessprofile/reviewGuidelines.jsp
Review reporting tips
The policy I’ve linked to (from Dex Media, which owns SuperPages) is the best I can find. It’s reasonably thorough but somewhat broken. To report a fake review to SuperPages, you’ll need either a SuperPages or Facebook account. Then, click the “flag abuse” link associated with the review and fill out a short form.
CitySearch
Policy: http://www.citysearch.com/aboutcitysearch/about_us
Review reporting tips
If you receive a fake review on CitySearch, email customerservice@citygrid.com. In your email, link to the business that has received the spam review, include the date of the review and the name of the reviewer and then cite the guidelines you feel the review violates.
FourSquare
Policy: https://foursquare.com/legal/terms
Review reporting tips
The “Rules and Conduct” section I’ve linked to in Foursquare’s TOS outlines their content policy. Foursquare is a bit different in the language they use to describe tips/reviews. They offer these suggestions for reporting abusive tips.
*If you need to find the guidelines and reporting options for an industry-specific review platform like FindLaw or HealthGrades, Phil Rozek’s definitive list will be a good starting point for further research.
Review spam can feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place
I feel a lot of empathy in this regard. Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other major review platforms have the visibility to drive massive traffic and revenue to your enterprise. That’s the positive side of this equation. But there’s another side — the uneasy side that I believe has its roots in entities like Google originating their local business index via aggregation from third party sources, rather than as a print YellowPages-style, opt-in program, and subsequently failing to adequately support the millions of brands it was then representing to the Internet public.
To this day, there are companies that are stunned to discover that their business is listed on 35 different websites, and being actively reviewed on 5 or 10 of them when the company took no action to initiate this. There’s an understandable feeling of a loss of control that can be particularly difficult for large brands, with their carefully planned quality structures, to adjust to.
This sense of powerlessness is further compounded when the business isn’t just being listed and discussed on platforms it doesn’t control, but is being spammed. I’ve seen business owners on Facebook declaring they’ve decided to disable reviews because they feel so victimized and unsupported after being inundated with suspicious 1-star ratings which Facebook won’t investigate or remove. By doing so, these companies are choosing to forego the considerable benefits reviews drive because meaningful processes for protecting the business aren’t yet available.
These troubling aspects of the highly visible world of reviews can leave owners feeling like they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Their companies will be listed, will be reviewed, and may be spammed whether the brand actively participates or not, and they may or may not be able to get spam removed.
It’s not a reality from which any competitive enterprise can opt-out, so my best advice is to realize that it’s better to opt-in fully, with the understanding that some control is better than none. There are avenues for getting many spam reviews taken down, with the right information and a healthy dose of perseverance. Know, too, that every one of your competitors is in the same boat, riding a rising tide that will hopefully grow to the point of offering real-world support for managing consumer sentiment that impacts bottom-line revenue in such a very real way.
There ought to be a law
While legitimate negative reviews have legal protection under the Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016, fraudulent reviews are another matter.
Section 5(a) of the Federal Trade Communication Act states:
“Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful.”
Provisions like these are what allowed the FTC to successfully sue Sage Automotive Group for $3.6 million dollars for deceptive advertising practices and deceptive online reviews, but it’s important to note that this appears to be the first instance in which the FTC has involved themselves in bringing charges on the basis of fraudulent reviews. At this point, it’s simply not reasonable to expect the FTC to step in if your enterprise receives some suspicious reviews, unless your research should uncover a truly major case.
Lawsuits amongst platforms, brands, and consumers, however, are proliferating. Yelp has sued agencies and local businesses over the publication of fake reviews. Companies have sued their competitors over malicious, false sentiment, and they’ve sued their customers with allegations of the same.
Should your enterprise be targeted with spam reviews, some cases may be egregious enough to warrant legal action. In such instances, definitely don’t attempt to have the spam reviews removed by the host platform, as they could provide important evidence. Contact a lawyer before you take a step in any direction, and avoid using the owner response function to take verbal revenge on the person you believe has spammed you, as we now have a precedent in Dietz v. Perez for such cases being declared a draw.
In many scenarios, however, the business may not wish to become involved in a noisy court battle, and seeking removal can be a quieter way to address the problem.
Local enterprises, consumers, and marketers must advocate for themselves
According to one survey, 90% of consumers read less than 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business. If some of those 10 reviews are the result of negative spam, the cost to the business is simply too high to ignore, and it’s imperative that owners hold not just spammers, but review platforms, accountable.
Local businesses, consumers, and marketers don’t own review sites, but they do have the power to advocate. A single business could persistently blog about spam it has documented. Multiple businesses could partner up to request a meeting with a specific platform to present pain points. Legitimate consumers could email or call their favorite platforms to explain that they don’t want their volunteer hours writing reviews to be wasted on a website that is failing to police its content. Marketers can thoughtfully raise these issues repeatedly at conferences attended by review platform reps. There is no cause to take an adversarial tone in this, but there is every need for squeaky wheels to highlight the costliness of spam to all parties, advocating for platforms to devote all possible resources to:
- Increasing the sophistication of algorithmic spam detection
- Increasing staffing for manual detection
- Providing real-time support to businesses so that spam can be reported, evaluated and removed as quickly as possible
All of the above could begin to better address the reality of review spam. In the meantime, if your business is being targeted right now, I would suggest using every possible avenue to go public with the problem. Blog, use social media, report the issue on the platform’s forum if it has one. Do anything you can to bring maximum attention to the attack on your brand. I can’t promise results from persistence and publicity, but I’ve seen this method work enough times to recommend it.
Why review platforms must act aggressively to minimize spam
I’ve mentioned the empathy I feel for owners when it comes to review platforms, and I also feel empathy for the platforms, themselves. I’ve gotten the sense, sometimes, that different entities jumped into the review game and have been struggling to handle its emerging complexities as they’ve rolled out in real time. What is a fair and just policy? How can you best automate spam detection? How deeply should a platform be expected to wade into disputes between customers and brands?
With sincere respect for the big job review sites have on their hands, I think it’s important to state:
- If brands and consumers didn’t exist, neither would review platforms. Businesses and reviewers should be viewed and treated as MVPs.
- Platforms which fail to offer meaningful support options to business owners are not earning goodwill or a good reputation.
- The relationship between local businesses and review platforms isn’t an entirely comfortable one. Increasing comfort could turn wary brands into beneficial advocates.
- Platforms that allow themselves to become inundated with spam will lose consumers’ trust, and then advertisers’ trust. They won’t survive.
Every review platform has a major stake in this game, but, to be perfectly honest, some of them don’t act like it.
Google My Business Forum Top Contributor and expert Local SEO, Joy Hawkins, recently wrote an open letter to Google offering them four actionable tips for improving their handling of their massive review spam problem. It’s a great example of a marketer advocating for her industry, and, of interest, some of Joy’s best advice to Google is taken from Yelp’s own playbook. Yelp may be doing the best of all platforms in combating spam, in that they have very strong filters and place public warnings on the profiles of suspicious reviewers and brands.
What Joy Hawkins, Mike Blumenthal, other industry experts, and local business owners seem to be saying to review platforms could be summed up like this:
“We recognize the power of reviews and appreciate the benefits they provide, but a responsibility comes with setting your platform up as a hub of reputation for millions of businesses. Don’t see spammed reputations as acceptable losses — they represent the livelihoods of real people. If you’re going to trade responsibly in representing us, you’ve got to back your product up with adequate quality controls and adequate support. A fair and trustworthy environment is better for us, better for consumers and better for you.”
Key takeaways for taking control of review spam
- All local enterprises need to know that review spam is a real problem
- Its scope ranges from individual spammers to global networks
- Enterprises must monitor all incoming reviews, and scale this with software where necessary
- Designated staff must be on the lookout for suspicious patterns
- All major review platforms have some form of support for reporting spam reviews, but its not always adequate and may not lead to removal
- Because of this, brands must advocate for better support from review platforms
- Review platforms need to listen and act, because their stake in game is real
Being the subject of a review spam attack can be a stressful event that I wish no brand ever had to face, but it’s my hope that this article has empowered you to meet a possible challenge with complete information and a smart plan of action.
Great article, Miriam (and that's an honest, real, review ;)), it really is a tricky situation to be in as a business owner or as a curious consumer looking for the best service/deal. I recently stumbled across Mike Blumenthal's work, and was amazed at just how much review spam is estimated to be out there and how crazy the location hopping is. I've seen some sites go for 'verified customer' as an attempt to highlight reliable/valuable opinions, but then as a consumer, how much trust can I put into that - are they somehow incentivised, santized? It's hard to judge. I once booked a hotel in central London that had good reviews on Booking.com, and then after i'd booked it, I saw terrible reviews on TripAdvisor. Those terrible reviews actually made me curious of what it would actually be like, so i kept my booking. I like TripAdvisor, and usually write a few reviews for places I've been, so after surviving the hotel, I wrote it a good review - it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the reviewers had made out. I agree with you - it really does seems to be an industry all of its own.
Thanks for the honest, real review, Andrew :) !
Totally agree with you about review spam having become an industry of its own, and Mike's work has been so eye-opening in this regard. I like TripAdvisor very much, too, but I think it's smart to keep in mind that people's expectation vary, even in the complete absence of fake reviews. A good hotel to me may not be perceived as good by someone else. That was nice of you to try to reflect your own, true experience of the establishment, since it was at such variance with other reviews.
I think it’s a slippery slope for Google to police reviews... I am a local guide and personally I noticed that many businesses have public WiFi. I didn't left any review using their WiFi, because I logged into my Google account. For review filtering, I analyzed the no. of the total reviews at the top of the business listing must be match the no. of actually displayed on the listing itself. If it's not, It may be a bug.
Review response is my first choice. I prefer to use report a flag, then I ask the Google community team to take action against it. On Twitter, I am using #StopCrapOnTheMap for it. BTW, Joy Hawkins really doing great here :)
I would like to see, If Google post a tagline on a GMB listing that the business has been caught falsifying online reviews.
Miriam, I have a question-
Is it true that any number power in flag the review option when several people do it? If yes, then it's not a good way because not everyone aware about the flag option, small business may affect. I think customer just left the review or read other reviews too.
Thanks Miriam for very insightful post.
Hi Kuldeep!
Thanks so much for sharing your experience as a Local Guide. In regards to your question, it would make sense to me that a review flagged multiple times would be more likely to be filtered than one that is flagged just once, but I have not seen hard evidence of this. It would be cool if someone would do a study! If you ever do one, Kuldeep, I'd love to read it.
Wanna hear something ridiculous? Google clarified recently that it's not against their current guidelines for FORMER employees to review a business - it just can't be current employees. I told them I think it's beyond stupid since no employee, past or present, is an unbiased customer. Although they removed reviews in the past that I sent in for this, they denied the most recent one and clarified that the guidelines only state "if you work at a place" (as in you currently work there). So. Very. Stupid.
Ahhh, Joy, that is is pretty nutty! So, as soon as someone gets fired, go ahead a write a review? Hmm ... Google may want to rethink that one. Thanks for the anecdote!
Definitely something that keeps me up at night. We have frequently been blackmailed by happy clients who want a huge discount. Just part of dealing with the public I guess. Thanks for a great article.
That's terrible, David. I'm so sorry to hear your business has had to deal with that. Would you be able to share how you've dealt with this situation? It could help others in the community. Thanks!
Many times online stores threaten us with putting some negative comments when really the deal has been perfect, and although it is not true is reflected. It is a way of tantalizing the trade to act as the user wants. Many times there are untrue opinions even of "clients" who are neither yours. Can we say that they are trolls of opinions?
Hi Fran,
May I ask for some clarification here? Online stores are threatening you, as a customer, with negative comments? Is this what you are experiencing? Where are the stores threatening to leave the negative comments? I've not encountered this scenario before.
Just ran into an interesting issue with one of our clients. A "Local Guide" left a one star review but didn't leave a comment describing his reasoning. Is a Local Guide similar to a Yelp Elite? By that I mean, does Google expect a certain standard for reviews left by these guides? A one star rating with no explanation for said rating is much less helpful than someone who gives a reasoning for the one star. Anyone have any experience getting reviews with nothing to back them up taken down easier than ones with written explanations?
Google could care less, they will not help unless you flag the review and it has something that violates "their policies". They are the worst. None of the big three do much to help unless the comments contain hate, violence or firearms or other topics like that. The review system has become a joke.
A great article Miriam that invites us to reflect on this problem that have business and businesses.
On the one hand, I believe that there is no immediate solution, because even if we make filters such as registered users, put personal photo, etc. There is always the component of subjectivity when evaluating an experience.
We are human and we are never objective in our own experiences. This does not mean that some measures are not taken, such as:
-Verify users.
-Place real names, not pseudonyms.
-Getting your stocking. There should be the possibility of seeing in your profile the global average that gives each valuation. It is not fair that they only evaluate when they have suffered a problem, because if we only qualify when we have bad experiences, all businesses would be sunk.
However, all these measures in turn violate other human rights, such as free opinion, the right to privacy ... That is why I comment that it is a very complex problem that hardly has a solution in the short term, especially because in some countries Like Spain, laws protect the privacy of people.
Hi Enrique,
Thank you for sharing your own reflections on this. This definitely is a complex scenario, as you've mentioned. The subjective nature of reviews is one that business owners have to consider in their efforts to "please the crowd", knowing that there will always be some people whom it is difficult to satisfy. The privacy side of things would be for the review platforms to consider. Thanks for taking the time to read and comment!
Hi Miriam,
Years ago we exchanged emails about positive review spam at a Houston auto dealer. As you've described in your article, the reviewers for one dealership had, usually on the same day, visited and reviewed businesses all over the US and Canada. And the fake reviewers had knowledge of the names of the dealership managers so the reviews looked very authentic until you clicked into the reviewers' histories. That dealership went out of business a year or so later.
Google tried to dampen review spam by requiring a Google+ account and a real name for reviewers. That cut the relative number of Google reviews compared to other reviews platforms, and Google has backed away from that requirement now.
The best "reviews" practice for local businesses is to establish and follow a business process for collecting feedback and encouraging customers to leave reviews. If you do, your business will grow because you'll have lots of actionable information from your customers for business improvement, and if your customers generally like you and leave good reviews, you'll have review insurance against the occasional troll.
Excellent article!
Hey Paul!
I remember you, of course. I hope you're doing well! Thumbs up on the mention of Google's history of reviews going from totally open, to requiring a G+ account and then changing back again. I wish I had access to the numbers of how review spam may have been affected in the different scenarios.
Good tips from you. Absolutely agree! Very nice to hear form you.
Google does not care about the reviews posted. Anyone from anywhere can post anything about ANY company with a Google listing. Its a complete joke. What makes it worse is that Google does not care to "review" the content unless it "violates" any of their ambiguous policies. A company being trashed on one of their sites by a spammer is not enough?
Facebook is little better, at least people can take the reviews down for a while and then re-add them once the angry haters have gone.
Yelp is the best of all, but that is not saying much. They do a better job with spam, but there are still people who "claim" to go to a business and be a customer, post hate, then Yelp will do nothing. They take the reviewer's word over the business, even if the business is a paying customer.
We went to Get Five Stars and we ask all of our "verified" customers for reviews. This has worked well for us with over 250 "verified" reviews and we rate with 4.9 out of 5 stars. They are an inexpensive alternative in a field where the big companies......really don't care.
Hey Jack,
Thanks for sharing that GetFiveStars has worked well for you in acquiring authentic reviews. I'm a fan of their product, too!
I agree GetFiveStars is a great product. However the whole review industry is being disturbed by Reputation Aegis who are an independent review aggregator, that verifies customers, can track staff engagement, get customer service KPIs, broadcast any review to Google, Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest timelines. This is a Customer Intelligence platform with Advanced Customer Satisfaction Surveys and Integrated Online Reputation Management.
Thanks Miriam, you have placed some great resource links in your post to each platform. Bookmarked!
Thanks for the bookmark, Brendon!
There are probably only a few hundred Businesses in total, with the right strategy and business processes in place, to easily identify real customers and where the spam reviews are coming from.
We cannot change human nature, so we need to implement the best way to prevent it impacting businesses.
It'd be nice if everyone just naturally wanted to play fair, but agree with you Clive, it's important to be realistic and prepared.
Does anyone know how recently Yelp started making the public aware of review spam through public notifications? I noticed this popup appear over the reviews for a bar in Austin, TX that was recently publicized after the owner wrote a racist reply to a bad review.
"Active Cleanup Alert
This business recently made waves in the news, which often means that people come to this page to post their views on the news.
While we don’t take a stand one way or the other when it comes to these news events, we do work to remove both positive and negative posts that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than the reviewer’s personal consumer experience with the business.
As a result, your posts to this page may be removed as part of our cleanup process beginning Wednesday, June 28, 2017, but you should feel free to post your thoughts about the recent media coverage for this business on Yelp Talk at any time."
Here's where I found this pop-up: https://www.yelp.com/biz/unbarlievable-austin
Are notifications like this present on other review sites besides Yelp, and do you think it'll make it's way over to Google eventually?
Looks like it started around October 2012 according to their blog post https://www.yelpblog.com/2012/10/consumer-alerts-b...
I believe (someone correct me if I'm wrong) Yelp is the only review site filtering reviews it thinks are fake. This is what's gotten business owners upset at them about. I personally feel it is necessary considering the amount of spam reviews on other sites and is what, as a consumer, makes me trust Yelp reviews more.
Good answer! Agree this started around 2012 with Yelp, and I'm not aware of this on any other major site.
Review spam has become so blatant on Google that I don't even bother looking at them anymore - people are not even subtle about it anymore and obvious review spam is ignored, in it's current form Google really should remove it from the search results as its completely misleading.
Here's to hoping Google ups their review-spam-catching game, Richard! It would make things better for all of us!
Thanks for this! It's a great guide. Although I haven't had any luck getting Google to remove a fake review for one of my clients. Google doesn't seem to listen.
I think Nowadays each local business directory listing site start yo filter reviews either they are real OR fake.
Any site who filter reviews are not compliant and they can be fined by the Competition and Marketing Authority and Advertising Standards Authority in the UK
Thank you Miriam - a great GUIDE :-)
Google Reviews needs some kind filter algorithm. I've been suffering review spam for years (mainly from competitors or people related or with any persons with any kind of interest). I oftentimes saw reviewers give reviews for hotels, car repair services, on restaurant in multiple cities under the same name at the same day.
Google is only one of 600 review sites, so it is important to have a strategy to get positive reviews across multiple sites, and on your website URLs so they appear in Google search. It is also important that genuine customers are identified on reviews and there are business processes in place to request reviews from all customers. It has to be easy for customers to leave a review and most review platforms make it difficult. With the right pro-active approach it becomes obvious which are spam reviews.
I agree with you, when I was starting to work in digital marketing world
did not know how to deal with that. Now I know that is a complete service that require an strategy, process, tasks etc.
Is very time consuming process, normally I avoid it because my client or not understand the value of that kind of service or they understand but they wont pay for that. Even worst they want it as bonus.
It is not expensive, time consuming or complicated and we can train a business in less than 30 minutes to use our system. The reason is we have the strategies, processes and tasks built in so the business does not need to learn them or set them up :-)
Excellent post!! Thanks for sharing.. It's a really interesting post because many websites have spam review..Here these post is really helpful for find which reviews are spam and which site have only spam review for they want to increase their r website sales or leads but sometimes Google check all spamming reviews and their sites gone spam..
Great post! Thank you so much for sharing it. We must be very careful about this.
Review of spam has really made an impact on the listings. Spam analysis helps the webmasters or the website owners to review their procedure.
That is to say that if we give to an individual of that caliber we can shake and even cross our fingers so that one of the giants will have us in mind ... if I am with you I think that there should be a law, that covers that act of evil.