Paying for Reviews Penalty?

[jeremyskillings]

Hello,  recently came across a company that has been paying people directly for reviews. I of course do not recommend this and realized the ethical implications and even the lawsuits that can come from this, but does Google have a manual penalty for fake reviews or do they just algorithmically discount ones that raise red flags? I have never really had to worry about this in the past.  I know you can flag fake reviews to them on an individual basis, but does anyone have history of knowing specific situations where a company was manually punished for doing this?  Just curious and I kind of wanted to give them strong documentation to knock it off.  Thanks in advance.

[Roman-Delcarmen]

In 2016 Google sent out a batch of new manual penalty notices that mostly hit bloggers. Bloggers were penalized for accepting free products in exchange for a review with a link to merchant’s website or accepting paid reviews with such links.

It’s a well known fact for years now that Google doesn’t like to see paid reviews or reviews paid through free product or free service pass PageRank.

Online stores who were buying lots of links that pass PageRank would get hit by a manual penalty or even worse, by the Penguin algorithm.

Google now decided to focus on those who enable merchants to get such links – the bloggers. So Google sent out manual penalties to bloggers who didn’t listen to this guideline.

Impact can be both positive and negative, depending on how good you were in obeying Google’s guidelines in past. Till now, if you only obtained a few links with this method where you give a free product or pay for review to a blogger, Google would be unable to figure out that you’re doing something wrong on a massive scale and you wouldn’t get penalized in any way.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jeremy,

Good questions, and unfortunately, the bad news is that review spam on Google is rampant, and unfortunately, does not appear to be well-policed. Technically, yes, Google could both remove spam reviews and penalize the listing that is engaging in them (either manually or algorithmically), but as Mike Blumenthal has recently been documenting, Google does not seem overly interested in devoting resources to catching or penalizing review spammers (definitely read: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2017/04/17/the-largest-review-spam-network-ever-or-who-is-shazedur-rahman-and-why-should-you-care/)

There seem to be thousands of fake reviews in the network Mike has been tracking which violate not only Google's guidelines but also, likely, FTC regulations. Unfortunately, this state of affairs with Google appearing to ignore massive review spam calls into question the trustworthiness of their review product and it's something I would hope to see them crack down on in future.

Google's situation provides good background as to the famous stringency of Yelp's review policies. Yelp is highly invested in ensuring that reviews on their platform are legitimate. This is why they remove 28% of the reviews they receive and why they have publicly shamed erring accounts from time to time.

So, for now, if you're trying to convince a business not to spam Google's review product, you are likely to have to use something other than the immediate threat of penalties as your argument. This might include:

1. The possibility of a future Google crackdown at any time, with consequences that could be as mild as a soft penalty with loss of the fake reviews, to as severe as being banned with all of the traffic and revenue your GMB listing used to drive for your brand vanishing overnight.

2. The possibility of consumers discovering spam on their own and causing permanent damage to the brand's reputation via Word-of-Mouth, social sharing, etc., as well as the obvious loss of the customer and his network of friends if they are disgusted enough.

3. The possibility of FTC actions, lawsuits, etc. This should startle any business on the review spamming road: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2296366/fake-online-reviews-cost-19-companies-usd350-000

4. The weakness of a marketing strategy that relies of faking success instead of actually achieving it. You can't use fake reviews as a benchmark of growth, gains, quality control or anything like that. You're just fooling yourself, instead of putting in the work to achieve a genuine reputation for excellence.

You may think of other discussion points, but these four should be enough to convince any legitimate business with even a small amount of concern for staying in business that these risky shortcuts are a hazard rather than an asset.

Hope this helps!

[JoyHawkins]

If you have evidence, feel free to add it here and I can send it over to Google.  They remove reviews for businesses that do this provided there is proof of it.

[MiriamEllis]

Joy's advice actually provides point #5, Jeremy. Personally, I wouldn't recommend outing your own client for review spam, but in addition to consumers realizing reviews are fake, your client's competitors and their SEOs may realize it and report the reviews to the GMB forum or to a Top Contributor like Joy, etc.

So, that would be a 5th point to raise with your client.