Late last month, fresh York Attorney General’s office announced the findings associated with the investigation it conducted into the business of creating fallacious online reviews for various businesses. Although it isn’t a ubiquitous practice for Marketing and advertising firms, some companies did perform these tasks. google review posting service
Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman confirmed that 19 enterprises signed agreements to refrain from posting fake online reviews and paid fines ranging from $2,500 to as high as $100,000. Essentially, the purpose of the fake online reviews, mostly on Yelp, Google and Yahoo, is to rise the company’s awareness, improve its appearance and even increase revenues.
“What we’ve found is even worse than old-fashioned false advertising,” said the actual York attorney general in a statement. “When you examine a billboard, you can spot it’s a paid advertisement – but on Yelp or Citysearch, you assume you’re reading authentic consumer opinions, making this practice even more deceiving. This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit across the Internet tells us that we should approach online reviews with caution.”
What New York State investigators also found was that companies reached to be able to seasoned Yelp users and attempted to remunerate them with gift certificates and other types of offers in order to obtain them to post positive reviews. If the failed then they used freelance websites such as Craig’s List, oDesk.com and Freelancer.com to find writers and paid them between $1 and $10 for reviews.
Schneiderman also cited a 2011 Harvard Business School study, which examined Yelp reviews that were listed as fraudulent by the agency. Its four primary findings were chain restaurants were more unlikely to participate typically the scheme, restaurants with intense competition were more likely to publish fake reviews of those competitors, restaurants with bad reviews or little reviews were more likely to get acquainted with fake reviews and 16 percent of restaurant reviews defined as fake were apt to leave extremely positive or extremely negative reviews than regular reviews.
The Internet marketing, or search engine optimization, industry very competitive and businesses try to innovate their products and services as much as they can to attract more clients. This local Tampa lawyers representing personal injury cases suggested that clients in order to hire an advertising firm must perform their due diligence and do plenty of research on the company. In the end, as any Promoting or SEO professional will say, it takes time to displayed on the first page of Google, to increase PageRank and boost domain authority. Great practice is comply with the guidelines posted by search engines, review websites various other Internet venues. Indeed, there is certainly a difference between sending out an announcement and falsifying appraisals.
Furthermore, it appears that law enforcement is continuing its efforts in catching companies offering solutions. Schneiderman confirmed it will still try to cease business from lying to customers.
