<story><title>UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56321576</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agsamek</author><text>My personal experience as a business owner. We do not care about reviews since we are a B2B software house. Our customers are mid- to large-size companies so they do not play reviews but lawyers if our service wasn&amp;#x27;t of highest quality :) My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn&amp;#x27;t want them.&lt;p&gt;Anyway - no customer gave us any review on google and our website is full of recommendation letters. But at some point google started nagging our employees to put reviews since they visited our office.&lt;p&gt;Guess what happened. We got our first review from an employee we were not happy with and planned to gracefully close our cooperation with.&lt;p&gt;This is against Google policy. So we complained. We had to spend significant time to get to a real person at Google and get this removed.&lt;p&gt;After a year similar situation happened. I thought ok - this should be easy the second time. No way - this time all the emails we knew did not respond, we could not reach anybody. We flagged the review several times. We could not do anything about that.&lt;p&gt;It is like a person can just put a shit on your office wall and you could not clean it. And shit owner - Google doesn&amp;#x27;t care.&lt;p&gt;We were forced to play by the rules and we bought 50 reviews to paint our wall. The company that provided this service was a Google partner. They explained that 80-90% of reviews of everything is written for money.&lt;p&gt;And the best thing - once we started getting our reviews, the flagged reviews were finally removed. Seems like AI decided the we are a good company.&lt;p&gt;Do you think we did something wrong? Immoral? Or just played business on a not leveled field?&lt;p&gt;And to summarize. I do not care about reviews. And we have money to fight back with lawyers or PR. But it is sad that some businesses don&amp;#x27;t have this option and somebody (Google) can harm them through reviews they did not ask for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ficklepickle</author><text>Imagine you operate in an industry where these reviews are not permitted. You have your regulator telling you to remove them with no means of actually achieving that.&lt;p&gt;I saw this first-hand in finance. They ended up &amp;quot;disavowing&amp;quot; the listings so they had no control over them. Now the individual offices can&amp;#x27;t set their hours, but I guess it made compliance happy.</text></comment>
<story><title>UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviews</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56321576</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agsamek</author><text>My personal experience as a business owner. We do not care about reviews since we are a B2B software house. Our customers are mid- to large-size companies so they do not play reviews but lawyers if our service wasn&amp;#x27;t of highest quality :) My personal preference would be to prevent 3rd party companies like google from publishing reviews if the business owner doesn&amp;#x27;t want them.&lt;p&gt;Anyway - no customer gave us any review on google and our website is full of recommendation letters. But at some point google started nagging our employees to put reviews since they visited our office.&lt;p&gt;Guess what happened. We got our first review from an employee we were not happy with and planned to gracefully close our cooperation with.&lt;p&gt;This is against Google policy. So we complained. We had to spend significant time to get to a real person at Google and get this removed.&lt;p&gt;After a year similar situation happened. I thought ok - this should be easy the second time. No way - this time all the emails we knew did not respond, we could not reach anybody. We flagged the review several times. We could not do anything about that.&lt;p&gt;It is like a person can just put a shit on your office wall and you could not clean it. And shit owner - Google doesn&amp;#x27;t care.&lt;p&gt;We were forced to play by the rules and we bought 50 reviews to paint our wall. The company that provided this service was a Google partner. They explained that 80-90% of reviews of everything is written for money.&lt;p&gt;And the best thing - once we started getting our reviews, the flagged reviews were finally removed. Seems like AI decided the we are a good company.&lt;p&gt;Do you think we did something wrong? Immoral? Or just played business on a not leveled field?&lt;p&gt;And to summarize. I do not care about reviews. And we have money to fight back with lawyers or PR. But it is sad that some businesses don&amp;#x27;t have this option and somebody (Google) can harm them through reviews they did not ask for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blub</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re in the EU, maybe you can sue Google?&lt;p&gt;I read about a case of (I think it was) a hair salon owner where Facebook automatically created a Facebook business page for them. They sued and they were forced to delete it.</text></comment>