Recently I was contacted by an SEO company for doing SEO of my website. I asked them what they had to offer and they proceeded with their sales pitch. One point they stood out from their sales pitch was that they can get me fake google reviews which pushes the ranking up on google page. I was taken aback and decided to search for my own website ranking on google.
I found out many websites which copied my content or copied the style and heading of my content. To add to this they had lot of google reviews which pushed their website further up in google ranking. I proceeded to have a look at the reviews and within one glance I found out that they were fake reviews.
How to find out fake reviews?

  1. Look at the text of the review. Many times the reviews will have bad english. The reason is that the reviews are written by people who are not fluent in english. These are mostly the employees of the SEO company as for SEO you do not need fluent english
  2. Look for the length of the sentence. If the sentence is short or one worded, then it is most definitely fake. If you were my client, I would ask for at least a paragraph.
  3. Check with the website testimonial page. If there is a review, it would be on the testimonial page of the website, if they have it. It would not make a sense to not put the review on the website as google can, at any time, remove the review from the listing on search engine.
  4. Check the name of the person or email associated with the review. If the email is like "coolguy@gmail.com" or name is like "Vicky" or "Honey", then it most definitely mean that the user is not genuine. If the website owners claim that they made the software for a company, then in no way the company representative will use these type of emails.
    Be very careful out there. With proliferation of internet, any person with no experience or know how can become or claim to be a mobile app developer. In fact, my own SEO personnel decided to create a competing website while he was being paid to do SEO on my website.
    So, you need to be careful to whom you should give your contract or rather your hard earned money to.