Comments on: How Google Has Handled Reviews Reflects a Long History of a Tin Ear and Little Action

By: Google Places: Reputation Management or Extortion in the Moving Industry? | Understanding Google Maps & Local Search

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:25:44 +0000

[...] either an incredible lack of staff, an incredible lack of sensitivity or perhaps just an incredibly, on-going tin ear to the needs of the needs of their small business clients vis a vis [...]

By: Google Places Reviews Being Lost – Houston We have a Problem! | Understanding Google Maps & Local Search

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:16:19 +0000

[...] the palace guards and the reviews were the crown jewels. It in area of great angst for many and Google’s poor handling of them brings down a stream of complaints and insults like no other area in the [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 18:34:35 +0000

That may be but in the end they have not yet implemented ANY spam control on reviews

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 01:11:16 +0000

The thing is, Google is not the Better Business Bureau or the Ombudsman Office. Google, Yahoo Local, Yelp, etc. are open websites that must also consider privacy issues. It would be great if every business review can be identified with a real customer but that is unfortunately hard to achieve. So, sites like these must strike a working balance between privacy issues, business libel concerns, genuine visitors, spammers, unfair competition, and so on. In the end it is a combination of spam control, business response, and user validation that places weight on a review or not.

By: Earlpearl

Earlpearl — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:41:37 +0000

Miriam:

I agree with you. Cathy’s bulleted points are 100% spot on.

Absolutely well said Cathy. If the review sites allow the sock puppets to publish anonymous attack reviews and have Zero accountability. the businesses should be able to call them out.

Frankly, if the review is anonymous, and it attacks a real entity, they should highlight that the reviewer is anonymous and write a warning:

this review is anonymous and could have been planted by a malicious sock puppet or more likely an underhanded competitor!!!

By: Cathy

Cathy — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 14:40:48 +0000

@Ted – The sock puppets are allowing spammers to take top placement spots through their sheer volume of reviews. To make matters even worse, these kinds of spammers also use Google’s Blogspot to create their landing pages. Despite numerous spam reports filed, nothing seems to happen.

@Miriam – The ability of business owners to respond should cut down the number of malicious reviews from sock puppet accounts – and that’s a very good thing. Still – the anonymous accounts can create many other problems for legit local SMBs.

@Mike – Thanks for the reminder there’s still much work to be done to make Google Maps and Place Pages more useful and credible.

By: MiriamEllis

MiriamEllis — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:36:44 +0000

I always enjoy learning from Cathy’s hands-on experience as a savvy SMB, and she’s pointed out something really important here: the anonymity factor. Despite this, however, with the new owner response capability, business owners will now at least have some ability to respond, whether they are replying to Bob Jones or CrazyBOB.

By: Mike Blumenthal

Mike Blumenthal — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:14:34 +0000

@Ted

Reviews are one area that Google has implemented no visible form of spam control….they have massive amounts of data about what is good and what is not but up to this point have done nothing to ferret out the obvious spam…one can only assume that it has to be on their radar.

By: Ted Paff

Ted Paff — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:09:03 +0000

Mike,
The rise of the sock puppet accounts is becoming a serious issue and, if unchecked, will result in Place Pages reviews being spam heaven. There are already many companies place pages which are hopelessly spammy.

Do you have any sense that Google is working on this?