Does Google crack down on fake reviews?

Is there a Google review bot?

I'd like to do a Google review.

I've got a bunch of websites that are under my control, and I'd like to get them all indexed and linked.

I'm guessing that Google's review bot is a huge pain in the ass for me to bother with. And I'm just not that important, so I can't ask for a review.

How does one go about getting a review from Google? If I were to write a book about how to make money with Google, I'd probably have to get a few reviews. That seems to be the way the market works.

But Google has no such thing. I'm just talking about one of their sites. Is there some trick?

(This is my first post here. I just signed up, but this seems like the place to ask.)

It's been a long time since I wrote a book about making money online. I had a publisher back in 1998. They were the first to publish my "Make Money Online" site.

But that book was published in a short time frame, and the market changed quite a bit. The Internet had just begun to become popular, and we didn't really know what was going to happen.

It turns out that the Internet was a huge success. Most people made a few hundred dollars in their first year. And it was a fun new thing to talk about. So the book sold well.

But there were a few things that didn't turn out as well as I thought they would. For instance, when the book came out, I got a lot of "good idea, but too late" comments. Most people don't see the Internet coming.

Also, people didn't understand that making money online takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. There's a learning curve.

And I ended up with a publisher who treated me like I was a very small publisher. I got no royalties. They were just trying to make a quick buck. They were too greedy.

I still get comments about my book today, but most of the time they're along the lines of, "Great, now I can quit my day job." This is a very good book for making money online. But it was just too late. People had already moved on to other subjects.

Is it illegal to bribe for Google reviews?

Now if the claim was made by a legitimate Google Reviewer, I would take the money and write a positive review.

But as an attorney, I can see why the law would be so harsh toward this individual. It is clearly illegal to pay anyone to write a Google Review and I believe that they could arrest someone for the same activity if it was committed against someone other than the site owner.

Is it worth my time to fight these charges? Should I fight them in small claims court? Should I wait until the individual threatens me and then sue him/her under some law such as trespass or defamation? Google doesn't allow it but you can certainly pay to do your own reviews of a product. The trick is that they have to have proof of who wrote the review. If they don't have that, then they won't be able to prove it was the buyer's review. Once they have that proof, they'll be able to remove it.

In this instance, if the person paid for the review to get past the verification system, then it's not a review, which is then illegal. What we're all talking about here is known as 'shill-reviewing' where someone has posted a review that you will never see, whether online or offline, because it isn't favourable enough to sway your opinion. You are free to ignore it, because shill-reviewing is always against Google's rules. However, if a shill-reviewer posts on your own blog, or even posts directly on your own product, you should be able to challenge the review, because that is direct infringement on your own property rights. This doesn't really work the way you are describing it. If someone posts a real and valid positive review of my product on their own site, then it becomes their property as soon as they post it. That's how Google works with reviews. You can even have that person write an honest review on the item and you can submit that for a credit.

As for being a Google reviewer, it's true you can become a Google reviewer.

Does Google detect fake reviews?

Hi, I'm having a small problem with a client of mine.

They have a website and a blog, and they want to get people to post fake reviews for their website/blog. Or am I missing something else?

So this is a good question, because the same thing happens for myself. As you said, this gives a lot of false positives. And as you suspect, it's not always "fake" reviews. They also will detect your own reviews, or other people's, if they have a good reputation, and are very positive about a product or service.

So, for yourself and for your client, what you can do is to go into the "Reviews" tab in your Webmaster Tools account, and look through all the entries to see how many false positives and how many "real" reviews. Based on that, you should be able to take the proper action.

But you don't have to limit yourself to the Webmaster Tools. You can also download the full .csv report from your Google AdWords account. That file contains both "real" and "fake" reviews, for all of the pages for which Google has detected such reviews. If you open that up in Excel, you should be able to pick out the "real" ones.

And of course, when you're creating an AdWords campaign, make sure you use negative keywords.