3 Reasons You Should Never Buy Google Reviews

1. Fake Reviews Lack Authenticity

Fake reviews are usually very easy to spot. Bought and paid-for reviews are usually immediately suspicious because of the type of language they use.

Those disreputable companies selling Google reviews online will often work from a template, allowing them to copy and paste thousands of reviews in a day in an effort to maximize their own profits.

And trust me, customers can easily spot fake reviews.

Common Features of a Fake Review

• Talk generally about the product or service
• Not giving a real reason as to why they gave five stars
• Stuffed with keywords
• Repetitive
• Look unnatural compared to how people normally write
• The profile has either given one review in total or gives the same review to all

It’s a bad idea to be impatient with new reviews for your Google business profile and introduce fraudulent reviews as they give no value to your business page.

Clicking through to their reviewer profile can also help shine a light on how inauthentic they are. Fake profiles are likely to have hundreds of reviews against their name. Furthermore, many often them are posted on the same day as many customers buy reviews from them.

Or conversely, that profile may just have a single Google review on it as the user will make a fresh account for each one.

Consequences of Lacking Authenticity

• Potential customers can identify fake reviews a mile away. Spotting bought Google reviews will immediately feel like a breach of trust. If you have dozens of obviously fake reviews, customers won’t have any faith in both you and your product and move on. This means that you’ll be losing more customers thanks to your Google listing.
• It has the opposite effect of “social proof”. Instead of encouraging more people to use your services, you end up driving more people away. Things are even worse if you are a local business that people can talk about with acquaintances to get the real picture.

2. Not Knowing Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Paying for reviews is like living with your head in the sand, a refusal to acknowledge weaknesses or play to your strengths.

In fact, businesses need more honest feedback not less as this is the only way they can implement genuine improvements. Successful companies stay on the pulse of their customers and improve customer experience continuously.

Buying Google reviews or asking people to write falsified reviews on other review sites doesn’t help with that.

Consequences of Having Fake Business Reviews

• The reviews become meaningless. You never improve your product or services which hurts you more in the long run. You’re essentially wasting money on fake paid reviews.

• You may never resolve issues or pain points. Even though you earn Google reviews you are drowning them out with dozens or hundreds of paid-for positive reviews you’ll remain ignorant of the areas you need to fix.

• Legitimate customers and negative reviews can help you out more than a sea of incentivized review postings on Google Maps or other review platforms.

3. Legal Minefield and Against Google’s Policies

Paying outright for Google reviews can come very close to being illegal in a lot of countries.

In both the UK and the USA, misrepresenting your business, or claiming it’s something that it isn’t, is illegal, and paid-for reviews skirt dangerously close to the edge of this definition.

Both the Competitions & Markets Authority in the UK and the Federal Trade Commission in the USA have taken action in the past against those companies farming out fake reviews online.

In addition, paying for reviews is in violation of Google’s own policies. It’s not a smart move to piss off one of the most used search engines.

Google states that while it’s OK to solicit (authentic) reviews from customers, it’s a definite violation of the terms of service to start paying for reviews.

This also applies the other way around. If you decide to badmouth your competition and pay to have them bombarded with one-star reviews to make yourself look good, there’ll be consequences if you’re caught.

Painful Consequences with Authorities

• You could face civil fines from the Federal Trade Commission (or its equivalent in your country), and even face criminal proceedings for buying reviews or making incentivized review requests.
• Google can choose to remove reviews if they find them to be fake or paid for. Google doesn’t take kindly to those who violate its policies and you can definitely expect your rankings to suffer if they find out you’re being dishonest.