Fake review on Consumer site

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mattwnz

15208 posts

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# 1822189 14-Jul-2017 00:55

freitasm:

Yes and no. He was probably talking about those SEO spammers that go around posting how great something/service is in blog comments, forum posts, paid blog posts,etc, with link drops. This got so bad Google started penalising websites by reducing their presence in search results, based on the quality of inbound links.

Companies also send free products to a range of Vloggers and Bloggers, in hope to get them to write or post video reviews. Some also pay for this on top of the free product if their website or channel has a lot of visitors / viewers. If you look at many youtubers these days, with 100k + subscribers, they will often do reviews on products. At least some do say when they are doing this, and whether or not they are being paid extra to give a review. This all apparently helps with SEO.
I know someone who has a youtube channel with a decent subscriber number, and they get contacted all the time by overseas companies (usually out of asia) wanting to send them products for 'reviews', and a link back to their website for SEO benefits.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
64775 posts

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# 1822316 14-Jul-2017 10:31

mattwnz:

freitasm:

Yes and no. He was probably talking about those SEO spammers that go around posting how great something/service is in blog comments, forum posts, paid blog posts,etc, with link drops. This got so bad Google started penalising websites by reducing their presence in search results, based on the quality of inbound links.

Companies also send free products to a range of Vloggers and Bloggers, in hope to get them to write or post video reviews. Some also pay for this on top of the free product if their website or channel has a lot of visitors / viewers. If you look at many youtubers these days, with 100k + subscribers, they will often do reviews on products. At least some do say when they are doing this, and whether or not they are being paid extra to give a review. This all apparently helps with SEO.
I know someone who has a youtube channel with a decent subscriber number, and they get contacted all the time by overseas companies (usually out of asia) wanting to send them products for 'reviews', and a link back to their website for SEO benefits.

You mention this as I wouldn't know it. In my case I never got paid to post reviews (and was asked many times "How much do you charge to review our product?" because this seems to happen quite frequently). I also sometimes keep the products, return the products, or simply giveaway on Geekzone. You surely saw many giveaways around here before?

I also genuinely only post about a product if it's good. If it's bad I won't post - because even bad reviews are overlooked and people go straight to the link to buy something. There's one case where the product is so bad I actually posted how bad it is (read the updates at the bottom).

In the USA is actually against the law to promote a product via "reviews" without disclosing any money or benefit received.

Also here is my disclosure.

My technology disclosure | Digital Transformation | Enterprise Content Management | Customer Relationship Management | Data Insights, Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics

DarthKermit

4957 posts

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# 1822317 14-Jul-2017 10:35

Thanks, I was gonna ask if you've ever had a request to give a product a more favourable review than it otherwise deserved.

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