Most business owners are happy when they receive notifications that they received a new review. Typically they are not excited when it’s a negative review. I rarely see a business owner upset when receiving a positive review. I did have several cases that I world on where businesses got hit with fake 4-star reviews. This past weekend, I did see another strange case where a company received ten fake 5-star reviews that somebody generated with ChatGPT.
Imagine receiving two to three hundred 3, 4, and 5-star reviews on the same day. That is precisely what a group of spammers did to hotels and restaurants. I mapped out the review profiles for thirteen reviewers that reviewed Hilton Garden Inn Singapore Serangoon. I discovered 133 business profiles received fake reviews on March 12, 2023. The spammers left reviews for Singapore, New Delhi, Peru, Spain, and Mexico businesses.
The review profiles are a mixture of local guides and non-local guides. The local guide program is a way to earn points for leaving reviews, uploading photos, editing business profiles, and more. All you have to do to enter the program is to post a review, and Google will ask you if you want to join the program. Local Guide reviews do rank higher than non-local guide reviews.
These reviews are a prank or a calculated test to determine Google’s review filters. In March 2022, Google tightened the review algorithm, and in early February 2022, Google admitted that they were too aggressive in filtering out reviews. Google filtered out honest reviews, while fake reviews were running wild. Whatever the motivation behind these fake reviews is, business owners are not amused.
The workflow to start the process is to flag each review and wait three days to see if the reviews get removed. Can you imagine how time-consuming it would be to flag two or three hundred reviews just for Google to tell you that there is no policy violation? If you escalate the reviews via the GBP Help Forum, Google won’t take action if you don’t flag each review. The good news is since this impacts over one hundred businesses, Google won’t need each business to flag each review. The question is how long it takes for Google to remove the reviews. Will the spammers do it again?
