(Newswire.net – April 18, 2013) Vancouver, BC — Business reviews on public sites like Google and Yelp can make or break a mom-and-pop business, and for a lot of unscrupulous business owners, posting fake reviews means more cash under their mattresses.
For two years, websites like Google, Yelp and Facebook have used an increasingly complex computer filters designed to separate the real accounts and reviews from the fake ones.
Unfortunately, sometimes they work too well. Yelp.com, for example, is a business review website that has widely been criticized for filtering out a good deal of actual consumer reviews, making it harder for businesses to recover after a defamatory review posted by a single disgruntled customer.
As a result of this collateral damage, figuring out what triggers these filters has been a topic of heated debates on many consumer websites, as well as black-hat marketing forums across the web. Luckily for an average consumer, until recently there has been little success in cracking the code on most of the major review websites.
However, at a recent internet marketing conference in San Francisco, Ivan Budimir, an internet marketing watchdog from Vancouver, BC, surprised over 2,000 attendees with an announcement of a case study which demonstrated how anyone with a computer and an internet connection can defeat even the strictest of such filters, bypass Gmail account verification or remove negative reviews on Yelp.
“I discovered this completely by accident,” says Budimir, who posted his step-by-step method on his personal website
“My intention was to test out some ideas about mobile device marketing without having to buy a bunch of phones so I made a few virtual devices using free software. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that review filters ignored my virtual devices.”
Unfortunately for an average consumer, this likely means a proliferation of fake reviews worldwide. In a majority of cases, the cash incentive for creating fake reviews alone can be too great of a temptation for an average business owner. Positive feedback has been proven to result in increase in number of customers which can be substantial.
In more extreme cases, having bad reviews could even lead to death threats, which was the case with the owner of Doggie Den – a California pet grooming company that found itself a center of media frenzy after an accident claimed a life of a patron’s pit bull Ramsey.
With such an incentive, how likely is it that websites like Google are about to issue an update to their filters any time soon?
“Not likely,” says Budimir, “I’m just too small for Google to take notice. My method has been downloaded less than 200 times since I made it public. To put this into perspective Google processes an estimated 6 billion searches every day, so it is likely going to take a year or two before this becomes a problem for them. I am worried that this method is a little too easy to use, though”
In the meantime some businesses are already starting to use this to remove bad reviews from Google.
“Bad reviews are an issue for a business only if they are visible on a first page of results,” says Budimir, adding that his method can be used for effectively “removing” negative reviews on Yelp or Google. Online chat rooms are full of complaints from businesses where a competitor, or even a dismissed employee posted a fake negative review about a business in hopes of harming their sales.
“It is often said that the best place to hide a dead body is on a second page of Google. If a business listing is overwhelmed with positive reviews, the negative ones will simply get pushed off the first page, effectively being as good as gone,” says Budimir, adding that this method levels the playing field for those businesses who are victims of predatory defamation tactics.
Other networks, such as Facebook seem to be equally affected. According to a CNN.com’s article from last summer, Facebook had at least 14.3 million spam accounts which they hoped to shut down. Since that number was made public last August, Facebook made good on its promise, at least in part, by shutting down 7 million accounts.
However the unconfirmed reports state the method used to bypass Google reviews is equally effective when it comes to bypassing Facebook filters as well. It would seem that it’s just a matter of time before this method becomes more widely known, and therefore problem for Facebook.
So what does this mean for the public at large as most people remain blissfully unaware of the problem?
“Consumers should be told that any reviews posted on the web can easily be manipulated to suit anyone’s need, and that public opinions should always be taken with a grain of salt, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. Discoveries like these can be used for both good and evil,” said Budimir.
The instructional video for setting up a system that bypasses these filters can, at least for the time being, be downloaded by clicking here or by visiting Ivan Budimir’s personal site at http://www.ivanbudimir.com/reviews
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About the author:
Zoe McAlister is a globetrotting internet specialist who writes on a variety of topics within the online work industry. Follow this link to find Zoe McAlister on Google+