{"id":14984,"date":"2013-06-03T06:00:34","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T10:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=14984"},"modified":"2013-06-03T11:51:45","modified_gmt":"2013-06-03T15:51:45","slug":"google-local-review-scams-a-simple-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/google-local-review-scams-a-simple-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Local & Review Scams – A Simple Solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Local scams involving Google are like dipthera on dog feces<\/a>, very common. Whether it’s the hundreds of companies trading<\/a> off of Google’s name, fake Google plaques<\/a>,\u00a0selling reviews<\/a>, a company\u00a0implying<\/a> that they are Google and offering to “help” you claim your listing or\u00a0claiming<\/a> to be able to rank you first because of a special direct relationship to Google, scams involving Google seem to evolve with the local opportunity de jure.<\/p>\n

To some extent Google has impacted<\/a> the review for sale issue with their review filtering technology. However for most of these scams Google can do little to prevent them and G can only respond after the fact. It must be like whack a mole for their busy legal department.<\/p>\n

But when this scam email came across my desk, immediately upon receipt <\/strong>I thought:\u00a0<\/strong>“well I better go check my reviews”… It is clearly a deceit but one that readily attracts the business owner. Yet it \u00a0is one deceit that Google could and should have solved long ago.<\/p>\n

Re:here r your bad reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n

Your business\u00a0reputation is in jeopardy!<\/p>\n

I found a negative review about your business on Google. It only took a few short minutes to find a negative review about your business on other credible directories, and it didn\u2019t take much longer to find even more.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>No matter what kind of advertisement you do, people look you up in Google and other popular directories before contacting you and as soon as they see the negative reviews, they stop contacting you. If you want to safeguard your online reputation – and protect the steady growth of your business – then monitoring and responding to negative reviews like the ones posted on\u00a0Google, Yelp, Citysearch, InsdierPages, Yellowpages, Mantra etc is crucial.\u00a0According to the latest research at the Harvard university,\u00a0<\/b>72% of local consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.<\/b><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let your bad review influence hundreds of potential customers. Reputation Management has quickly moved from being an option to a necessity.<\/p>\n

We are Reputation Marketing experts and I want to send you a FREE custom Reputation Report\u00a0that will reveal in detail your company\u2019s online reviews<\/b>. To get your free report call us at (866) 966-7396 and we can begin to rebuild your 5 star online reputation together.<\/p>\n

Warm Regards,<\/p>\n

Roland Sahak<\/p>\n

Reputation Marketing Expert<\/p>\n

The solution?<\/p>\n

Google should implement some form active notification when a business receives a review on their claimed Google listing. Ideally this notification is one that would bring businesses back to the Dashboard and allow them to respond to the review from within the Dashboard rather than forcing them back to the G+ Page to make a response.<\/p>\n

Google could also provide some sort of active feed of the + Page that could be used by the business and 3rd parties alike although that seems unlikely given Google’s recent trends to keep data and people on their pages.<\/p>\n

Regardless Google could stop these sorts of scams cold, provide some solace to businesses receiving reviews AND increase SMB engagement with Google’s new dashboard. This is a simple solution that should have occurred years ago but there is no time like the present. The new, plug in ready Dashboard offers the perfect environment to make up for lost time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Local scams involving Google are like dipthera on dog feces, very common. Whether it’s the hundreds of companies trading off of Google’s name, fake Google plaques,\u00a0selling reviews, a company\u00a0implying that they are Google and offering to “help” you claim your listing or\u00a0claiming to be able to rank you first because of a special direct relationship …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14984"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14986,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14984\/revisions\/14986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}