Beware of Companies that Manufacture Reviews
It’s really disheartening to see news stories exposing the dark side of customer reviews:
Companies that manufacture reviews for their clients are dishonest and unethical, period. Sadly, however, many of their clients do not realize this is happening until it is too late. At iconnectu, we pride ourselves on performing customer services calls that yield authentic feedback from your customers. We gather both the good and the bad. And, our purpose for developing a feedback plan for your business and conduct customer feedback calls on your behalf is simply to help you get true, unbiased and genuine reactions from your customers to help you better understand how your customers truly view your products and/or services.
Bottom line, iconnectu’s customer service calls result in authentic feedback. Let’s look at ways some companies are muddying the waters by using rouge and unethical strategies.
Manufacturing Customer Reviews for Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There are plenty of rogue SEO companies who practice black hat SEO. Black hat SEO uses techniques and strategies that are contrary to Google Best Practices. Placing tons of manufactured positive reviews out there may give your organic SEO a short-lived boost, but will eventually get you in hot water. The sad thing is you may not even know that the shady SEO company you hired has done this until it is too late. We partner with a marketing firm – Casto Communications – that only uses online strategies which fall within Google Best Practices. When the above-mentioned article came out, we asked them their thoughts. They explained some ways that algorithms detect fake reviews, which we will discuss in the next section. The takeaway here is that if you are going to employ a company to manage your SEO, make sure they are ethical, honest and follow Google Best Practices!
