Fraudulent marketing rant and wecustomer.com ad by anon IP
Late recently, the brand new York Attorney General's office announced the findings of the investigation it conducted in to the business of making fallacious online reviews for various businesses. Though it isn't an ubiquitous practice for Internet marketing firms, some companies did perform these tasks.
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 goal of the fake online reviews, totally on Yelp, The search engines, would be to enhance the company's awareness, improve its appearance and also increase revenues.
"What we've found is a whole lot worse than old-fashioned false advertising," said the newest York attorney general in a statement. "When you appear at a billboard, it is possible to tell it's really a paid advertisement - but on Yelp or Citysearch, you assume you're reading authentic consumer opinions, creating this practice a lot more deceiving. This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit over the Internet lets us know that people should approach online reviews with caution."
What The big apple State investigators also found was that companies reached out to seasoned Yelp users and attempted to remunerate them gift cards as well as other kinds of offers to acquire them to post positive reviews. If that failed they used freelance websites such as Cl, oDesk.com and Freelancer.com to discover writers and paid them between $1 and $10 for reviews.
Schneiderman also cited a 2011 Harvard Business School study, which examined Yelp reviews that have been listed as fraudulent by the company. Its four primary findings were chain restaurants were less inclined to participate in the scheme, restaurants with intense competition were more prone to post fake reviews of these competitors, restaurants with bad reviews or little reviews were prone to take part in fake reviews and 16 percent of restaurant reviews defined as fake were more prone to leave extremely positive or extremely negative reviews than regular reviews.
The net marketing, or search engine marketing, marketplace is quite competitive and businesses try to innovate their products and services around they could to draw in more clients. Essentially, it's advocated that clients looking to hire a web-based marketing firm must perform their research and do a great deal of research on the company.
In the long run, just like any Online marketing or SEO professional will say, it takes time to be visible on page one of Google, to improve PageRank and to improve domain authority. The very best practice would be to stick to the guidelines posted by engines like google, review websites as well as other Internet venues. Indeed, there may be a big difference between broadcasting an argument and falsifying reviews.
Furthermore, it would appear that police force continues its efforts in catching companies offering these services. Schneiderman confirmed it'll still make an effort to cease business from lying to customers.
"This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit throughout the Internet tells us that we should approach online reviews with caution," added the attorney general.