Did you know that it has been reported that up to 20% of Yelp reviews are fake and that a simple one-star bump in reviews can create a 5% - 9% increase in revenue according to a Harvard study? If that doesn’t make business owners pay attention to monitoring, reporting, and responding to your reviews, I’m not sure what will!
So, you’ve worked really hard to serve your customers and build a positive presence for your business online. It seems like there’s nothing worse when you receive a fake review.
This is especially difficult for business owners who don’t have many reviews to begin with. Here, I'm going show you all the escalation paths you have to report fake reviews.
Many sites have algorithms designed to address fake reviews that include things like filtering reviews from users who have no history (particularly Google and Yelp), it can also detect unnatural language that has been empirically found to exist in fake reviews.
For example Review Skeptic uses machine learning to detect fake reviews with (what they claim is) 90% accuracy. However, their algorithm is designed to flag fake reviews for the hotel industry.
Also on TechWyse
Addressing Negative Reviews & Reputation Management
Google’s New Spam Detection Update for Reviews: What It Means for Your Business
This blog is designed to help you report fake reviews. If you want to report a competitor who has fake positive reviews, you can also use the techniques found in this blog post.
How to Report a Fake Review on Yelp
To report a fake review on Yelp, you can flag the review.
- Create an account using @yourwebsite.com and flag the review or login with your existing Yelp account. It will prompt you for an explanation. Now, it’s your job to write a detailed reply to Yelp.
- If that doesn’t work you can email all the details to feedback@yelp.com.
How to Report a Fake Review on Google My Business/Google Places/Google+ Local
With Google My Business the only option is to flag the review as inappropriate. Google will then check if the review violates any of their policies and will take appropriate action.
Make sure you hover near the reviewer’s name so you can see the option to flag. If enough people flag the review Google may review it.
From the above screenshot, you can see that the business owner has responded to the review. This is probably your best course of action since Google is not likely to pull down a review if you ask a bunch of your friends and colleagues to flag the review as inappropriate.
Also, notice the word “inappropriate.” It’s not the same as fake, this could just be a simple check for abusive and vulgar language.
How to Report Fake Reviews on Facebook
While Facebook doesn’t allow us to report fake reviews, it does allow you to comment on a review. This is your chance to reply to an unsatisfied customer and tell your side of the story. For more info about this see the Facebook help page about responding to reviews.
The Bottom Line
Ultimately you are responsible for the review people leave on your site. Customer service has never been so important and going the extra mile to please a customer is probably worth the extra cost you will incur vs. getting a bad review.
As I mentioned a one-star bump in your reviews can mean a 5% - 9% increase in revenue. That’s up to $90,000 for a company that does $1 Million in revenue annually!!!
I hope the tips in this blog will help you increase your revenue, by keeping your reviews at a healthy star rating.
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!
on
Sadly its getting tougher to get fake reviews removed from Google. I have supplied Google with over 200 fake profiles that only had half them deleted. Google. I resubmitted the reviews to and Google is refusing to remove them. I have started blogging about this practice and Google continuing to turn a blind eye to this illegal practice.
on
It is very sad that a company can have a stellar reputation for many years and then one person muddies the water and goggle and other review sites only have an interest in hosting material, no matter what is said. I would like to write a review on YELP and Goggle and any site that lets anything be posted without responsibility. I have a policy of not writing negative reviews.
on
We have noticed a competitor, that has a very poor reputation, per many reviews and the BBB rating, has built up over 150 Google Reviews, in 18 months. I strongly suspect he’s generating these, could be one or more things Google doesn’t allow.
It is really a shame to see see then at the top of the Google 3 Pack.
Just my rant, as I can find no way to report them.
on
We got like 15 bad reviews from our competitors on google+ and I did flag them out but the reviews are still there… These competitors were so silly that they even reviewed using their own name and they all work on the competitor company, so unethical.
After a few weeks waiting for the reviews to be removed we decided to expose them and prove what they did on this article: http://www.backpackerpubcrawl.com/blog/the-nasty-world-of-online-reviews
Feel free to have a look, it is actually unbelievable how little effort they even put on it. We hope google could read this article and at least to remove the fake reviews from our pages.
on
A great way to regulate this would be integrating reviews into phones so a phone number must be active for the review to count. That would make it very hard to fake these things at least…
on
The problem is that Yelp earns too much money this way to change it. Even if you flag the review it will be after everyone has seen it already. I watched an interesting new company that is talking how to solve that issue on Internet but I don’t remember the exact process, name is Honaro Reviews. Apparently they developed some sort of code that stops the scammers from posting fake reviews and there is a way to verify the customers.
on
I’ve heard that Yelp has many false reviews before but I did not know that the rate was so high or that other sites experienced the same problem. Thanks for pointing out how to flag them, it’s so important to be able to get rid of people paid to take businesses down that don’t deserve it!
on
That’s crazy! I’ve always wondered and suspected that some comments were fake on these sites. However, I never would have thought they’d actually pay for something like that. It’s nuts the extent a business will go. I also never knew there was a website you can go and report this type of thing. Interesting article; I enjoyed it.