When anyone searches for just about anything on the internet, most of us tend to rely on user reviews. We all have our own systems, with some people looking for how many, while others will only look to read the poor ones. But what about the fake ones? When speaking of contractors, since that’s what we are, there are a few tell tale signs to know if the reviews they’re getting are fake.
- Companies will have many positive reviews shortly after getting a few bad ones. You can easily see this by scrolling through the reviews and looking at when the positive reviews were left. If a company gets a bad review on Google, you may notice 6 to 10 positive reviews within the next week or so, all lumped together in an attempt to drive the bad reviews further down the line.
- Their reviews all sound the same. In water damage restoration, you may see dozens of reviews all left at the same time claiming breaks in water lines and flooded homes. And although this can happen, it’s very unlikely to all happen in the middle of the night and in the middle of the summer.
- The users leaving the reviews only have one review. It does happen, but it’s also uncommon for a person to take ample amount of time to write a great and lengthy review, and then never have done the same for anyone else. This sometimes is a sign of new accounts being started just to write a review.
- They’re number of reviews get lost. Once Google goes through routine checks of companies through their service, you may notice a company who once had 20 reviews, now only showing 14. That’s because Google marked those reviews as suspicious, and removed them.
- They all sound the same. When the same person is creating fake accounts and writing fake reviews, eventually they’ll start sounding the same. They’ll use the same examples, or phrases and even misspell the same words. You can easily spot this by the lengthy praises they give the company while using the same words like, “Fantastic, Outstanding, Life Saving,” etc.
Be sure to thoroughly do your due diligence when hiring anyone, just the same as you would for a purchase. Reading all the reviews will help you tremendously, especially the bad ones, while also looking at the time line of when they were posted.
