At this point, you’re probably aware that online reviews can be less than honest. Unscrupulous vendors, manufacturers, and other businesses aren’t above priming their economic pumps with a little glowing praise from people who might not be wholly impartial.
But fake reviews aren’t the only means of gaming the system: there’s a new and growing trend of reviews that can be manipulated and turned to a company’s dishonest advantage even when they’re left by genuine customers. Generally, these reviews are created on sites that differ from the actual point of sale or service, and then highlighted or buried at the vendor’s pleasure. It’s all about getting the right kind of exposure for SEO, or search engine optimization.
A Well-Known Template
When it comes to controversial user reviews on the web, there’s no better example than Yelp. Ostensibly a site for restaurant reviews that expanded to more or less all retail businesses, Yelp has gained a sordid reputation among both business owners and customers thanks to its controversial policies.
Despite purporting to provide unbiased reviews from customers, Yelp has been accused of offering to remove poor reviews and highlight positive ones for extra money from businesses, removing positive reviews when businesses turned down offers for paid advertisement, and advertising competitors on the pages of small businesses that refused to pay.
Thus far, though, a flurry of complaints and legal threats against Yelp have failed to produce any punitive results. The largest of these was a class action lawsuit from small businesses that accused the company of extortion.
A federal appeals court dismissed the suit, not on the judgement that Yelp had done nothing wrong, but after determining that manipulating reviews on a private website wouldn’t count as extortion even if it had been proven.Even so, the value of high-profile and at least theoretically impartial reviews is obvious. Some small businesses in tech-savvy urban centers can live and die on their Yelp scores, even after years of public controversy. Now search engines like Google have begun to integrate both their own reviews (via the Google Maps review system, in this case) and third-party platforms into search engines. Observe: a web search for a popular Fort Worth restaurant includes five star scale ratings from Google Maps, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Zagat, and Open Table, all highly visible on the first page.
The point here is to highlight just how valuable online reviews can be for a business…and how lucrative it is to be able to manipulate those reviews.
Adjusting the Algorithm
Now that every business understands the vital nature of online reviews, not to mention how malleable they can be, new players are arriving. While tools like Google or Zagat covet user feedback because it makes their tools all the more valuable for those same users, a new class of review service is emerging for the benefit of the businesses themselves. Imagine the information age as a pendulum: online reviews have caused decentralized power to swing in favor of consumers, and now businesses are trying to pull it back the other way.
An excellent example happened to me a few weeks ago. I purchased a Steam game code from a seller on eBay—nothing particularly unusual or interesting, and I received what I paid for without any kind of issue. But after the transaction was complete, I received an email asking…
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