How reputable are company reviews?

[Zig27]

I was looking up a local company and read their reviews and found this company sounded wonderful. I went and had a bad experience.

After when I spoke to various friends they said it was a bad company and not to use them. I since found the owner had put a 5 star review to boost the ratings.

Could the company have bought fake online reviews or could their friends be leaving the reviews?

Where were the reviews?

But yes, most review sites can be doctored in some way. Google are quite protective of their review system, for example, and will hide any reviews that they think are suspicious, for example if they come from the same IP address, or someone reports them.

Facebook reviews are usually fairly accurate, since they cracked down on people incentivising reviews

Trustpilot really depends if the profile is claimed and how they go about things. Trustpilot say that they do not allow companies to report or remove reviews, but I've worked somewhere that paid for Trustpilot support and definitely managed to get 1 star reviews removed fairly regularly. They'd leave a couple to make it look more genuine.

Generally if I'm picking something based only on reviews, I look at a few different places (Google, Facebook, some of the product review sites if they show up) to get a general opinion from a few places; rather than relying on one source.

But yes, most review sites can be doctored in some way. Google are quite protective of their review system, for example, and will hide any reviews that they think are suspicious, for example if they come from the same IP address, or someone reports them.

Tripadvisor does similar plus they from what I heard blocked the business for a bit from managing page. I used to watch few food outlets and at certain times lots of reviews kept appearing and disappearing.

All reviews should be taken with a pinch of salt. Some are fake, some are biased because people with just a normal experience are less likely to review than people with bad one (guilty) and so on.
So it's good to look at few sites if possible.

Could well be friends and family of the owner. But equally, people are more likely to go online to complain about a bad experience than they would if they had a really positive one. If people have warned you about the company, following their bad experiences, it's likely that the owners are trying to mitigate their poor reputation through positive online reviews.

Over the autumn, there was an interesting situation with Styled by Susie who (hope I get this right) asked her clients to post positive reviews. For various reasons, lots of negative reviews followed and it all blew up. So, it's a tale of caution to companies.

I've seen reports of people buying 5 stars on trustpilot - presumably happens elsewhere too.
things I look for are:

• all reviews (or a bunch of 5star ones) all left within a day or so of each other.
• lots of reviewers that have only left one or two reviews (especially when the few they have left are for related companies and they've said exactly the same about all of them.
• consistently poor English across all reviews