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My personal experience as a business owner. We do not care about reviews since we are a B2B software house. Our customers are mid- to large-size companies so th

My personal experience as a business owner. We do not care about reviews since we are a B2B software house. Our customers are mid- to large-size companies so they do not play reviews but lawyers if our service wasn't of highest quality :) My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them. Anyway - no customer gave us any review on google and our website is full of recommendation letters. But at some point google started nagging our employees to put reviews since they visited our office. Guess what happened. We got our first review from an employee we were not happy with and planned to gracefully close our cooperation with. This is against Google policy. So we complained. We had to spend significant time to get to a real person at Google and get this removed. After a year similar situation happened. I thought ok - this should be easy the second time. No way - this time all the emails we knew did not respond, we could not reach anybody. We flagged the review several times. We could not do anything about that. It is like a person can just put a shit on your office wall and you could not clean it. And shit owner - Google doesn't care. We were forced to play by the rules and we bought 50 reviews to paint our wall. The company that provided this service was a Google partner. They explained that 80-90% of reviews of everything is written for money. And the best thing - once we started getting our reviews, the flagged reviews were finally removed. Seems like AI decided the we are a good company. Do you think we did something wrong? Immoral? Or just played business on a not leveled field? And to summarize. I do not care about reviews. And we have money to fight back with lawyers or PR. But it is sad that some businesses don't have this option and somebody (Google) can harm them through reviews they did not ask for.

blub 6y ago
If you're in the EU, maybe you can sue Google? I read about a case of (I think it was) a hair salon owner where Facebook automatically created a Facebook business page for them. They sued and they were forced to delete it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vasco 6y ago
  They said they had money for PR but probably not infinite amounts to take on Google at court.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    I don't know where the idea that taking Google to court would cost you infinite amount of money comes from. First you get your lawyer to just write a letter stating clearly what's wrong, and what action you're aiming to take by which point. Keep it reasonable. Have the lawyer point out exactly which point of their own TCs they are breaking and set a date by which you will initiate legal proceedings if they don't respond. In my experience that alone solves 90% of problems even against large companies, because they know ignoring it will cost them more money. And if you do end up going to court over a small thing like this it's not going to be a court case out of TV drama that takes 20 years and costs millions.
    - derfitt 6y ago
      Yes, also in general in a legal dispute you can make it very clear at the start what you would accept to resolve the matter. So if you end up going to court or otherwise running up large legal fees, at the end of the process you can point to the earlier communication and say 'We would have settled this matter quickly and cheaply at the start, for the same or less than what we have got now. Therefore Google should have to cover our fees.'
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      "Have the lawyer point out exactly which point of their own TCs they are breaking" But my business never had anything to do with Google, so I never signed any T&Cs At this point TCs of megacorps are basically creating a parallel legal system
- null-10-03-2021 6y ago
  I guess you might have success if FB is making a page that appears to be representing your business. Because well, that seems like misrepresentation, or straight up fraud. But publishing reviews of your business sounds well within the bounds of freedom of speech. Pretending that the page hosting those reviews is affiliated with you, probably not legal unless you have agreed to it. Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.
ficklepickle 6y ago
Imagine you operate in an industry where these reviews are not permitted. You have your regulator telling you to remove them with no means of actually achieving that. I saw this first-hand in finance. They ended up "disavowing" the listings so they had no control over them. Now the individual offices can't set their hours, but I guess it made compliance happy.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > industry where these reviews are not permitted. That should be Google's problem, if it wasn't above the law. (Which country/industry?)
  - ficklepickle 6y ago
    Consumer finance, Canada
bbutterworth 6y ago
> We were forced to play by the rules and we bought 50 reviews to paint our wall. Is dishonesty really the solution here? I would have thought the first port of call is get the employees that do like working you (you do have them?) to give their honest opinions on Google too, diluting the effect of one review. Buying reviews (50 of them) to drown out a valid review from disgruntled employee doesn't seem ethical. This is where it gets grey: was it a valid review, or did the ex-employee make stuff up? I'm shocked that Google would remove negative reviews if there were more positive ones. That is a very compelling reason to buy fake reviews, on Amazon, Google, or anywhere.
zeepzeep 6y ago
> My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them. I like the fact that there's a third party controlling reviews, not the company itself. We all know how legit those Testimonials on websites are... I agree that it can have a bad effect, fake reviews are bad, but better than only fake reviews hosted by the company they're about.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  The proof is in the pudding, and unfortunately Google is not proving any more reliable than asking a random alcoholic that happens to be nearby
- agsamek 6y ago
  The review was against google policy (conflict of interests) and google provided ways to remove it were not handled by google at all. So this was not the case of taking off a legit review.
pjc50 6y ago
It's interesting that I've not yet seen the free speech argument break out here; when it comes to qanon nonsense people are very keen to defend the right of posters and denounce any removal as censorship.

blub 6y ago

If you're in the EU, maybe you can sue Google? I read about a case of (I think it was) a hair salon owner where Facebook automatically created a Facebook business page for them. They sued and they were forced to delete it.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vasco 6y ago
They said they had money for PR but probably not infinite amounts to take on Google at court.
- gambiting 6y ago
  I don't know where the idea that taking Google to court would cost you infinite amount of money comes from. First you get your lawyer to just write a letter stating clearly what's wrong, and what action you're aiming to take by which point. Keep it reasonable. Have the lawyer point out exactly which point of their own TCs they are breaking and set a date by which you will initiate legal proceedings if they don't respond. In my experience that alone solves 90% of problems even against large companies, because they know ignoring it will cost them more money. And if you do end up going to court over a small thing like this it's not going to be a court case out of TV drama that takes 20 years and costs millions.
  - derfitt 6y ago
    Yes, also in general in a legal dispute you can make it very clear at the start what you would accept to resolve the matter. So if you end up going to court or otherwise running up large legal fees, at the end of the process you can point to the earlier communication and say 'We would have settled this matter quickly and cheaply at the start, for the same or less than what we have got now. Therefore Google should have to cover our fees.'
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    "Have the lawyer point out exactly which point of their own TCs they are breaking" But my business never had anything to do with Google, so I never signed any T&Cs At this point TCs of megacorps are basically creating a parallel legal system
null-10-03-2021 6y ago
I guess you might have success if FB is making a page that appears to be representing your business. Because well, that seems like misrepresentation, or straight up fraud. But publishing reviews of your business sounds well within the bounds of freedom of speech. Pretending that the page hosting those reviews is affiliated with you, probably not legal unless you have agreed to it. Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

ficklepickle 6y ago

Imagine you operate in an industry where these reviews are not permitted. You have your regulator telling you to remove them with no means of actually achieving that. I saw this first-hand in finance. They ended up "disavowing" the listings so they had no control over them. Now the individual offices can't set their hours, but I guess it made compliance happy.

pjc50 6y ago
> industry where these reviews are not permitted. That should be Google's problem, if it wasn't above the law. (Which country/industry?)
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  Consumer finance, Canada

bbutterworth 6y ago

> We were forced to play by the rules and we bought 50 reviews to paint our wall. Is dishonesty really the solution here? I would have thought the first port of call is get the employees that do like working you (you do have them?) to give their honest opinions on Google too, diluting the effect of one review. Buying reviews (50 of them) to drown out a valid review from disgruntled employee doesn't seem ethical. This is where it gets grey: was it a valid review, or did the ex-employee make stuff up? I'm shocked that Google would remove negative reviews if there were more positive ones. That is a very compelling reason to buy fake reviews, on Amazon, Google, or anywhere.

zeepzeep 6y ago

> My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn't want them. I like the fact that there's a third party controlling reviews, not the company itself. We all know how legit those Testimonials on websites are... I agree that it can have a bad effect, fake reviews are bad, but better than only fake reviews hosted by the company they're about.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
The proof is in the pudding, and unfortunately Google is not proving any more reliable than asking a random alcoholic that happens to be nearby
agsamek 6y ago
The review was against google policy (conflict of interests) and google provided ways to remove it were not handled by google at all. So this was not the case of taking off a legit review.

pjc50 6y ago

It's interesting that I've not yet seen the free speech argument break out here; when it comes to qanon nonsense people are very keen to defend the right of posters and denounce any removal as censorship.