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Who NOT to Trust

Should we always trust 5-star reviews? The answer is more than clear

Whenever I see multiple, 5-star reviews, I’m suspicious. The same goes for websites with positive reviews from unknown third-party providers (not Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, etc.) or websites with “John Doe” and “Jane Doe” reviews. (By the way, our other website seogalway.com uses these popular techniques)

Recently I have been doing some Keyword gap analysis, comparing my keywords to keywords of my competitors and during the process I spotted this nice example for our “Who NOT to Trust” Blog category.

Nearly 500 full 5-star reviews. WOW!

So, while browsing the internet I have seen something. I don’t want to comment on the title and description, but this something was with almost 500 full 5-star reviews.

5-star rating reviews • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland

I visited a website page designed by some Best Design Company without any contact information but with very strange and incomprehensible content, repeating “Seo Galway Ireland” from time to time…

Phony texts • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland
Example of contact information from a fake website • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland

There is no way to submit a review, but two reviews have already been proudly displayed to future customers.

Reviews • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland

I followed some links and was not surprised to see more reviews on other pages (“businesses”) of the same girls, but this time with different names.

Website Reviews • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland
Reviews • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland
Reviews • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland

Yeah, the website is definitely well liked by girls with really nice names! 😃😃😃

How does Google display the review information in the search results?

5-star rating reviews • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland

The truth is, all you need to show the great reviews in Google search results is just a snippet of code. It is named “Review structured data”.

There are different ways to implement it and in the following link you can see all the information about that.

The so mentioned code could look like this:

Review Structured Data • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland

Please note that the image above is not an example of how to do it!

The presence of the company in Google My Business

I tried to find the company on Google My Business and leave a review as well, but sadly I couldn’t – may be, because they have some type of multi-location disorder.

Example of contact information from a fake website • SEO Smoothie • SEO Agency • Ireland

Faking the SERPs – Rich Snippet Hacks, Penalties & Author Removal Alternative

Faking the SERPs – Rich Snippet Hacks, Penalties & Author Removal Alternative

Faking the SERPs

An article written by Razvan Gavrilas – Founder & Chief Architect of cognitiveSEO, an SEO Toolset focused on in-depth analysis of ranking signals.

It is a pleasure to see other people who share the same opinion on abusive “Marketing” practices. Thank you.


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