Review Spam

Review spam is a generic term used to describe reviews that are not genuine.

Review spam can be negative: posted, paid for or encouraged by competitors of a business (or people and businesses related to that competitor).

Review spam can be positive: posted, paid for, or unfairly encouraged by the business or product owner (or people and businesses with a vested interest in the well-being of the reviewed business or product).

Review spam is any review that is not impartial and unsolicited.

Jason Barnard

Examples:

• The reviewer is actually a competitor of the business
• The reviewer is actually the owner, an employee, or a marketer of the business he is reviewing
• The reviewer never had a transaction with the business
• The reviewer had a transaction, but is lying about the details of it
• The reviewer received an incentive to write the review
• The reviewer violates the guidelines on the platform on which he’s writing his review

Review spam is very common and very hard to detect.