6 ms·

An interesting thing about paid reviews - you can prove that the reviews are fake, but you usually can't prove that the business itself actually paid for those

An interesting thing about paid reviews - you can prove that the reviews are fake, but you usually can't prove that the business itself actually paid for those reviews. In a hypothetical world where companies with fake reviews are regularly discovered and lambasted in public, it's easy to imagine a sinister metagame where unscrupulous small businesses can buy bad good reviews (i.e. 5-star reviews that are obviously fake) for their competitors to make them seem sketchy. The folks selling the fake reviews certainly don't care who's paying. There's no obvious solution to me for that potential problem aside from stopping fake reviews before they're posted (which feels like the kind of thing that's much harder than it sounds); thankfully it doesn't appear to be a very common thing yet.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
That's fine. Just charge the fake reviewers and fake review companies with FCC violations, and remove their reviews. Have them hand over their books for lighter penalties, then hit the companies buying fake reviews with enforcement orders as well. Of course, all this is complicated by the fact that most of these companies are probably overseas . . .
- kofejnik 6y ago
  don't think FCC will prosecute bodyshops in India and Phillippines
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    I wonder the extent to which it's possible for such body shops to get accounts that are believed by Google to live in the U.S. (or fake-review destination country of choice). I see sites that purport to offer such accounts for 30-50 cents per account. So I guess it's not that expensive. I wonder how often these accounts get burned and how much revenue they generate with each account beforehand.
    - RileyJames 6y ago
      That’s exactly what services like luminati.io (holavpn) are used for. While accounts can be purchased, they then need to remain tied to a US IP address to avoid being restricted. There are some legitimate uses to proxy through residential IPs, but I wonder what percentage of traffic through luminati is legitimate. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a single digit percentage.
- sneak 6y ago
  > Just charge the fake reviewers and fake review companies with FCC violations, and remove their reviews. Then, as a sibling comment pointed out, you just pay to get obviously fake mass positive reviews for a competitor, and suddenly they have a null rating because the market has removed all the reviews.
foolmeonce 6y ago
This happened with normal search, Google punished companies for spam links to their websites which caused sites to pay for bad links to their competition to raise their relative ranking.. It's now necessary for everyone to review links to their site and disown them.
- test1235 6y ago
  I created a small one-off blog a while ago for a single hiking trip I made, and as you might imagine, I link to several product sites for the equipment I use - plain ol' links, not affiliated or anything. I got an email out of the blue one day from a product company asking me to remove a link. I did so, but I never really understood why a company would reduce business opportunity (however minute) by asking me to do this.
  - zadokshi 6y ago
    I’m not into SEO but I wonder if this type of thing can make a blog look like a sock puppet blog of sorts and thus impact google ranking??!
odnes 6y ago
I'm convinced that something similar is happening to Boris Johnson's tweets at the moment. Every time he posts, many of the top responses are exact copies of each other saying something like "the country is behind you, my prime minister <3". It's clear to anyone that these are 'fake', and I'd imagine it has the effect of making people thing that the conservatives are trying to artificially bolster his reputation.
- switch007 6y ago
  “My” prime minister? Ew, we don’t do that here. That makes it sound 100% fake.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Every politician does that. Check the posts of most autocratic accounts - half of them will be singing praises.
beckingz 6y ago
This happened on Amazon. Outcompeted by another product listing? Buy obviously fake amazon reviews and they would get suspended by Amazon for purchasing fake reviews. I've heard that Amazon is now more nuanced in how they handle suspensions, but it's a mess.
- zionic 6y ago
  We got an alert from Amazon that if we didn’t stop faking reviews we would be terminated. Given that we have never done so, it was quite a shock to us. I wonder which competitor of ours feels threatened.
  - the-pigeon 6y ago
    The other than that may be happening is bots building legitimacy. Like if you want to boost your product with 1,000 fake reviews then you need 1,000 accounts that don't look like bots. Meaning they need to do a lot of different activities so they have a behavior pattern that looks like a real person. Which would include posting other fake reviews. Of course in Amazon's case they could just require accounts to have purchased the item in question on Amazon to review it. But they must prefer more reviews to making it harder to manipulate reviews using bots.
    - SilverRed 6y ago
      None of these limitations work. There are facebook and IM groups set up where real users of Amazon sit and companies offer free products to these people for good reviews. These users have years of real account history and they really did buy the product. Its just on an external service, the seller refunds the money.
bootlooped 6y ago
Another factor that reinforces your conclusion (you can't prove who did or didn't buy them) is that a smart botmaster would have their fake reviewers also review random businesses that did not pay them. It makes it harder to detect that they're fake. For the same reason bots will try to friend random people on Facebook, follow random accounts on Instagram, etc...
throwaway_1301 6y ago
Disclaimer: Worked on the google anti-abuse team that handled this a while back. We know this and its not as far fetched as people might think - happens very frequently. The systems are designed to handle this appropriately. Fun to see how people try to game the system though :)

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

That's fine. Just charge the fake reviewers and fake review companies with FCC violations, and remove their reviews. Have them hand over their books for lighter penalties, then hit the companies buying fake reviews with enforcement orders as well. Of course, all this is complicated by the fact that most of these companies are probably overseas . . .

kofejnik 6y ago
don't think FCC will prosecute bodyshops in India and Phillippines
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I wonder the extent to which it's possible for such body shops to get accounts that are believed by Google to live in the U.S. (or fake-review destination country of choice). I see sites that purport to offer such accounts for 30-50 cents per account. So I guess it's not that expensive. I wonder how often these accounts get burned and how much revenue they generate with each account beforehand.
  - RileyJames 6y ago
    That’s exactly what services like luminati.io (holavpn) are used for. While accounts can be purchased, they then need to remain tied to a US IP address to avoid being restricted. There are some legitimate uses to proxy through residential IPs, but I wonder what percentage of traffic through luminati is legitimate. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a single digit percentage.
sneak 6y ago
> Just charge the fake reviewers and fake review companies with FCC violations, and remove their reviews. Then, as a sibling comment pointed out, you just pay to get obviously fake mass positive reviews for a competitor, and suddenly they have a null rating because the market has removed all the reviews.

foolmeonce 6y ago

This happened with normal search, Google punished companies for spam links to their websites which caused sites to pay for bad links to their competition to raise their relative ranking.. It's now necessary for everyone to review links to their site and disown them.

test1235 6y ago
I created a small one-off blog a while ago for a single hiking trip I made, and as you might imagine, I link to several product sites for the equipment I use - plain ol' links, not affiliated or anything. I got an email out of the blue one day from a product company asking me to remove a link. I did so, but I never really understood why a company would reduce business opportunity (however minute) by asking me to do this.
- zadokshi 6y ago
  I’m not into SEO but I wonder if this type of thing can make a blog look like a sock puppet blog of sorts and thus impact google ranking??!

odnes 6y ago

I'm convinced that something similar is happening to Boris Johnson's tweets at the moment. Every time he posts, many of the top responses are exact copies of each other saying something like "the country is behind you, my prime minister <3". It's clear to anyone that these are 'fake', and I'd imagine it has the effect of making people thing that the conservatives are trying to artificially bolster his reputation.

switch007 6y ago
“My” prime minister? Ew, we don’t do that here. That makes it sound 100% fake.
fakedang 6y ago
Every politician does that. Check the posts of most autocratic accounts - half of them will be singing praises.

beckingz 6y ago

This happened on Amazon. Outcompeted by another product listing? Buy obviously fake amazon reviews and they would get suspended by Amazon for purchasing fake reviews. I've heard that Amazon is now more nuanced in how they handle suspensions, but it's a mess.

zionic 6y ago
We got an alert from Amazon that if we didn’t stop faking reviews we would be terminated. Given that we have never done so, it was quite a shock to us. I wonder which competitor of ours feels threatened.
- the-pigeon 6y ago
  The other than that may be happening is bots building legitimacy. Like if you want to boost your product with 1,000 fake reviews then you need 1,000 accounts that don't look like bots. Meaning they need to do a lot of different activities so they have a behavior pattern that looks like a real person. Which would include posting other fake reviews. Of course in Amazon's case they could just require accounts to have purchased the item in question on Amazon to review it. But they must prefer more reviews to making it harder to manipulate reviews using bots.
  - SilverRed 6y ago
    None of these limitations work. There are facebook and IM groups set up where real users of Amazon sit and companies offer free products to these people for good reviews. These users have years of real account history and they really did buy the product. Its just on an external service, the seller refunds the money.

bootlooped 6y ago

Another factor that reinforces your conclusion (you can't prove who did or didn't buy them) is that a smart botmaster would have their fake reviewers also review random businesses that did not pay them. It makes it harder to detect that they're fake. For the same reason bots will try to friend random people on Facebook, follow random accounts on Instagram, etc...

throwaway_1301 6y ago

Disclaimer: Worked on the google anti-abuse team that handled this a while back. We know this and its not as far fetched as people might think - happens very frequently. The systems are designed to handle this appropriately. Fun to see how people try to game the system though :)