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Originally Posted On: Getting Fake Google Reviews – Don’t Make This Mistake – Arrivala

Google reviews are becoming the most important asset to your business when marketing small businesses online.  We’ve written about it in the past how changes Google started making back in 2018 and 2019 were going to push advertisers to spend more on Google Adwords and also focus on their Google Business profile to improve their ranking in map search.  That has led to a massive push on who can get the most Google business reviews in every industry imaginable.  As a result, business owners are turning to not-so-ethical practices to bring in more reviews.

Here at Arrivala, we do review collection the ‘right’ way.  Every review that we help businesses distribute is written by the actual customer.  We do not allow directly incentivizing the customer in any way, although we have found some interesting ways to indirectly incentivize through the use of charitable donations in exchange for reviews.  Our system is extremely effective at distributing reviews and automating review collection at scale.  We have thousands of customers using Arrivala and gaining REAL, authentic reviews every day.

This is the right way to do automated review collection and we hope you join us in signing up!

What’s The Wrong Way?

With that being said, we’ve seen in a large uptick in services, especially overseas, offering guaranteed Google review posting.  How these services typically work is they send out emails or text messages to your real customers asking for a review of your business.  Those customers visit a link and are able to leave a review that does not require any sign-in and is a very easy process.  However, that review does not go directly to Google, instead it gets placed in a queue within these third-party platforms.  From there, these third-party providers pay individuals overseas who have no connection to your business to take reviews written by other individuals and post them under their name.

What’s Wrong With This Method?

I’m happy you asked, as there are a few things:

1. From an ethical stand-point, it raises some red flags.  Your real customers who wrote a review of your business and did not give permission for it to be posted to Google are now seeing their review written on Google for your business (word for word) under somebody else’s name.
2. Your potential customers will notice.  We had a sales call with a new customer on Arrivala who showed us his review profile on Google.  He was a local plumber based in North Carolina and all of his reviews were written by people with foreign spelled names.  It becomes pretty obvious that these are not real reviews of your business.
3. Google will notice the fraud behavior.  The horror stories from business owners are becoming more common.  Google is removing reviews by the thousands and completely shutting down Google Business accounts that use this practice.  Business owners are paying hundreds of dollars per month over a period of a year or more only to have all of those ‘fake’ reviews removed from their Google Business profile overnight.  How will you feel when you spend $5,000 on 100 fake Google reviews only to have them all removed while you sleep and wake up to that money washed down the toilet.

What Should I Do?

The best advice we can give you is to collect your online reviews honestly and ethically.  There is no magical way to go from 0 to 100 reviews overnight (unless you have that many past customers).  Arrivala can assist in providing review automation services, automated follow-ups, charitable incentives, multiple review flows and so much more to get you the most ethical reviews possible for your business.  We also have the ability to bulk import your customers from a spreadsheet which can reach out to hundreds or even thousands of past customers automatically should you have that data available.  This can help you get a large initial influx of reviews.  Following that initial collection process, Arrivala can help consistently bring in ethical, real reviews using the power of automation.  You’ll sleep soundly knowing every review you receive is legitimate and will remain on Google Business profile for life.

Have a look at our Arrivla review collection plans.  You can view the Arrivala features.  Yes, we support international clients in Canada, Great Britain, Australia and more.  See our international review collection page.  Ready to signup?  We’d love for you to join Arrivala.