Google reviews, fakes and UK legislation to fight them
Google reviews now show local reviewer quality on review displays

Google reviews, fakes and UK legislation to fight them


Sat 27 Jan 2024
By John Nayler

At eCentral we encourage and love to see our clients attract more real and authentic reviews to Google My Business Profile and elsewhere.

Something that troubles us is that a minority of businesses use illicit methods or pay for reviews. This will get them higher placement in Google map search results and it's not right. The practice is perceived worldwide as deceptive and costly to consumers and good businesses. The UK recently account that 900 GBP of annual household spending is influenced by reviews and are legislating against it:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61154748

We believe it's great to see the UK government taking action against fake reviews and while this won't stop the practice, laws do hinder bad behaviour or at least draw a line. We can reasonably expect Australia will follow suit.

We also see Google making more effort to get on top of fake reviews. With the example, one means in use by Google is to show the number of reviews submitted by the reviewer and what's more showing when a person has written a lot of reviews locally... By increasing the visibility of authentic reviews, they are displacing lower quality reviews and fakes.


Related Links:
   BBC report on new UK Legislation against fake reviews



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