Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

The Bed Breakfast Traveler posted a provocative question on their blog this week: Do fake online reviews hurt businesses? Admittedly I hadn’t given much thought to fake reviews since in my own experience they are few and far between but it’s an interesting question to consider.

Online reviewers can be motivated to post reviews for a number of reasons as we’ve discussed on this blog before. But sometimes a reviewer’s motivation can be deceitful as he or she uses online reviews to harm a competitor’s business. Of course we’ve also talked about the effects of negative online reviews here before (not as detrimental as one might think) but the fact is that the internet makes it very easy to share unfair or untrue comments about people and businesses with a wide audience.

Fake reviews aren’t all negative either - some business owners may use online reviews to paint a glowing picture of their business while posing as a satisfied customer. Admittedly these types of fake reviews often walk a fine line between self-promotion and deception but it takes just one dissatisfied customer who is duped by a glowing review to come back and give online readers the real scoop. A 5-star rating quickly becomes a 3-star rating after just a single bad review.

Just how prevalent are “fake reviews” online? While I don’t have any concrete numbers to share with you (mostly because it’s impossible to tell for certain which reviews are fake) I can tell you that many times it is obvious which reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. As you’ve probably noticed most regular folks aren’t good actors so it follows that there aren’t many good fiction writers out there either. Fake 5-star reviews are the easiest to spot because they’re often so over the top they are just unbelievable. Fake negative reviews often lack details about what the reviewer dislikes and often fail to include a single positive statement (even the toughest critics always find at least one good to say).

Fake online reviews can be a problem on some websites but as a webmaster and a user you can trust in the wisdom of the crowd to minimize the effects of the fakes. Next week I’ll talk about some specific things you can do to resolve online reviewer disputes - good info for webmasters and reviewees alike!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 6:44 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.