How to combat Fake Review Optimization in travel | Tnooz

[Google Places Blogger]

"Black hat Online Reputation Management (ORM) groups are parasites. By making Fake Review Optimization (FRO) a discipline, they spread misinformation to game a growing social web, eager to improve travel planning and discovery through crowd-sourced knowledge.



The worst part is that FROs are smart, competitive parasites – the type that are unlikely to kill their hosts, but merely feed off of them indefinitely. Their clients tend to be hesitant to unplug in fear of losing rank and its associated volume-driving revenue stream."



Linda says: This is a great, really detailed article for any industry not just travel.

 

[Odeshevych]

Many internet reviews are fake nowadays, because most of the time it is internet marketing affiliates who write them. More than half of all the reviews of whatever product or website you want to evaluate very much biased. This is of course done to generate returns from those products. How do you determine if the review is fake or not?

Well, first you have to learn to 'read between the lines', to see if the author wants to sell you something. It usually starts with him criticizing other products and/or the current situation - the state of affairs you presumably would want to improve by purchasing the product the reviewer writes an article about. The second flag is that unbiased reviews are much more informative than the ones which strive to aggressively advertise something. When you've read an article, ask yourself: was this information actually helpful or not? These are just some of the methods, there are at least six I know of.