Beware of Fishy 4-Star Reviews

[MiriamEllis]

Hello to all our folks who market local businesses! I came across something this week that I felt was important enough to share.

Hopefully, if you're a Moz blog reader or a Moz Local customer, you're already well aware of the importance of monitoring your Google My Business reviews on an ongoing basis, responding to them as they come in, whether they're positive or negative. And, you know to be on the lookout for spam reviews.

But a strange new form of spam seems to be emerging that might be really easy to overlook at first. We're all familiar with the spammer who leaves you fake 1-star reviews for the purpose of harming your brand. But you might not immediately be suspicious of a 4-star review, or even a string of 4-star reviews until you realize your former 5 star rating has been whittled down by a succession of less-than-perfect, fake reviews. The worst thing, I think, about this tactic, is that it can be overlooked.

Jason Brown has captured this phenomenon in his recent post: http://reviewfraud.org/4-star-negative-review-attacks/ and I highly recommend reading it and paying extra attention to any 4-star reviews companies you market may be receiving. I'd suggest, if you find this going on with any of the GMB listings you manage, you report it to Jason so that he can continue to track this activity. He's a Google forum TC, and, perhaps, with enough evidence, he might eventually be able to make a case to Google about this practice.

[Debora09]

@Smileworks_Liverpool said in Beware of Fishy 4-Star Reviews:

Haha lol.  My business does 40k Net Profit a month and Starbucks is still too expensive!
But seriously, I have had loads of fake reviews, mainly from our competitors but have noticed some random ones creeping in.  Not patients at the practice but instead very generic.  It reminds me of the webform spam which started off as porn / viagra and then became more insidious so as to get past my gatekeepers or get a click or response from the newer receptionists at the practice.  They have started saying nice things like "great article, I loved reading this, can I have an appointment please for whitening".  The girls on front of house always respond to them because that's how they are trained and they are too busy usually to spot the email address that's from a bangladeshi pharmacy (very common one) or some sort of mens health company.
I try to stop them but al my actual enquiries end up in the trash.  It's a nightmare.  But spammers are adapting.  They are not ever going away. The more tech we use to screen them the smarter they get.
I have had lots of success getting google to remove reviews though.  It's not as hard as everyone says if you have the data and stats and evidence for Google.

Haha, the struggle is real! It's unfortunate to hear about the challenges you're facing with fake reviews. It's indeed a tricky landscape, and it's disheartening when genuine inquiries get caught in the crossfire. Adaptability is key, and it's impressive that you've had success in getting Google to remove reviews. It's a constant battle, but with vigilance and the right approach, we can navigate through it.

[adeelhussain86]

Thank you for sharing this valuable insight! It's essential for us, as local business marketers, to stay vigilant in monitoring our Google My Business reviews. The emergence of 4-star review attacks is indeed concerning, as it can be easily overlooked while gradually impacting a brand's reputation.

Jason Brown's post sheds light on this issue, and I appreciate the recommendation to read it. It's crucial to be proactive and report such occurrences to experts like Jason, who can track and possibly address this practice with Google. Maintaining the integrity of online reviews is crucial for both businesses and consumers, and your post serves as a helpful reminder to stay alert.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Seorankfuse!

You are so right that this is a very serious problem. Google's apparent inaction regarding it could be stemming from two causes that I can think of:

1. They are too comfortable as a result of being a monopoly. When Google entered local search, they did it without the consent of local businesses. Most owners simply found themselves thrown into the deep end of the pool, scrambling towards the realization that their information was now on a highly visible platform. So, basically, you had an entity representing the country's local businesses without their authorization, and Google support was so incredibly lacking back then, it was extremely stressful for owners whose information was wrong, spammed, conflated, hijacked, etc. It hurt real-world local businesses. Google's support has improved quite a bit since those days, but their brand attitude all too often appears not to have changed. I've now read so many stories of business owners who are literally being blackmailed by spammers or having their professional reputation damaged by review spam companies, I'm not at all impressed by Google's response. If their inability to address this scenario stems from a lack of competition, it's an object lesson in why monopolies are bad for the market.

2. Google may simply not know how to manage what they've built. It's a vast body of content they have on their plate. Other review platforms (like Yelp) appear to be far more stringent in the enforcement of guidelines and policing of content, but it could be that Google either lacks the dedicated staff members to manage their review corpus or that their engineers have yet to hit on an algorithmic solution that they're happy with for auto-detecting most forms of spam. I am not an engineer by any stretch of the imagination, but it would basically come down to a combination of identifying suspicious patterns + human support to greatly reduce the damage happening to real-world businesses as a result of Google's uncontrolled spam problem.

That's my take on this situation. I agree with you 100% that Google should be publicly addressing this and proffering a timeline of their planned solutions, but this just isn't happening. So, in the meantime, if you, a client or someone you care about is subject to a large-scale review spam attack, my best advice is to utilize PR to the maximum to draw attention to that particular case in hopes of one-off resolution. Not great, but there it is.

Further reading: https://twitter.com/JoyanneHawkins/status/1069596742776061952

https://www.localsearchforum.com/threads/4-star-fake-review-issue-over-2-3-million-fake-ratings-on-google.53556/

[seorankfuse]

This seems to be a major problem that I don't see a lot of people talking about. I can only find the article Miriam Ellis stated in the original posts (http://reviewfraud.org/4-star-negative-review-attacks/). There is a growing discussion on Google's GMB community forum with business owners trying to get these fake review removed but not much more.

The article linked above stated that "Over two million three seventy-eight thousand ratings have been left by these 27 profiles" and the number continues to grow.

To me, this seems like a very serious issue that has the potential to damage Google's integrity tremendously. Reviews are at the core of local search and are widely trusted by Google users. If Google doesn't figure out a way to stop this I would assume that people would lose trust in ratings and become obsolete to Google users. I would also assume that this would negatively impact relationships with business owners. Continuing to report fake reviews to Google one at a time to get them removed seems like a ridiculas task for business owners.

Is there something I'm missing?

Please help me understand.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Haha lol.  My business does 40k Net Profit a month and Starbucks is still too expensive!

But seriously, I have had loads of fake reviews, mainly from our competitors but have noticed some random ones creeping in.  Not patients at the practice but instead very generic.  It reminds me of the webform spam which started off as porn / viagra and then became more insidious so as to get past my gatekeepers or get a click or response from the newer receptionists at the practice.  They have started saying nice things like "great article, I loved reading this, can I have an appointment please for whitening".  The girls on front of house always respond to them because that's how they are trained and they are too busy usually to spot the email address that's from a bangladeshi pharmacy (very common one) or some sort of mens health company.

I try to stop them but al my actual enquiries end up in the trash.  It's a nightmare.  But spammers are adapting.  They are not ever going away. The more tech we use to screen them the smarter they get.

I have had lots of success getting google to remove reviews though.  It's not as hard as everyone says if you have the data and stats and evidence for Google.

[rahul009]

Thanks Mariam Ellis

Our services needs a lot of reviews tho. Good reviews it will help bring in new customers, Like Tim holmes said "it is about time that all review site had to partake in a verifiable way of getting all reviews." I think this will help on a long run

[Libra_Photographic]

Thank you so much for this, I have experienced this with one of my clients, its a real pain for the honest person just trying to run a business. We rely so much on SERP to bring in business and when something like this has the potential to affect it is most frustrating.

[TimHolmes]

An interesting concept which I do agree is most likely not commonly monitored. We have purposely tried move to verified review partners which only accept reviews from genuine customers of our service, but that is not to say that open review sites cannot still be plagued by negative fake reviews or in this case good fake reviews. Surely it is about time that all review site had to partake in a verifiable way of getting all reviews.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There!

So sorry to hear that happened to you. Facebook does allow you to disable reviews, but unfortunately, you can't do that on the other majors like Google and Yelp. Were you seeing this same phenomenon on these other platforms? What did you do?

[Isildur]

I've seen this happen on other platforms like Facebook a long time ago as well. I enabled reviews for a client and saw around 80 - 100 reviews and all of them were a 4-star rating. At the time I knew it was fishy. I reached out to all the people leaving the reviews but most of the profiles were new and empty and never responded. I didn't think too much of it because in essence having a score between 4 - 5 is still good. I also thought that when the 1-star review come as they always do, that the higher score with a lot of weight would keep the actual score high for a longer period of time before dipping below 4.

Long story short, the (fake) reviews went from 4 down to 3 and after an extended period of time, it went from 3 - 2 etc. We had to eventually disable reviews but I've seen that strategy apply to other sites as well. Trustpilot, WOT and even on review sites.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Julie,

Thanks so much for commenting. That's actually one of theories going around - the some people might be doing this for points. There could be some cases where it's that (and albeit, that's a guideline violation in itself) and other cases where it is straight-up malicious.

In your shoes, I would watch closely for any further fake 4 point reviews. If you get enough of them, your rating will start to fall from 4.8 and you could end up with 4 stars, 3 stars, etc., and that will be the sign that the business is being targeted. A one-off case could be nothing. But if you start to see more them, I'd be concerned. Crossing my fingers that this doesn't happen to you, but if it does, do report it to Jason.

[julie-getonthemap]

Thanks Miriam,

I got one of these recently, but I think a 4.8 looks more realistic than a 5.0 so I don't mind. Do you think they're doing it just to get Google points? The person who wrote mine is clearly not a client or prospect. She wrote a review about Starbucks being too expensive, so she certainly isn't going to be hiring a marketing consultant.