Can you trust review sites?

I don’t know.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve regularly received, through the contact form on my website, spam from companies selling reviews.

That is, they will post positive, glowing reviews of my company on various review sites online.

For a fee, of course.

So, you have to wonder how many review sites are compromised by this kind of activity.

How do they know if someone is a legitimate customer versus a paid service? I mean, the more verification hoops they require someone to jump through to leave a comment, the less likely real people will leave a comment, right?

If I’m upset with a company, the last thing I want is more hassle. And, if I have to go through a bunch of steps to leave a comment on a review site, I’m just going to go to another review site, where it is easier to leave my comment.

Thus, the sites people will gravitate to to leave reviews will be the same sites that these review “services” can game.

And, you cannot just trust the bad reviews, because you can’t be sure those reviews weren’t paid by competitors to make that business look bad.

In the end, we’re back to the old fashioned ways… Listening to trusted sources, like magazines we trust or people we know.

Because, otherwise, how do you know if a review is legit?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2011 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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