
How SEO Killed Online Reviews - trevin
http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/how-seo-killed-online-reviews/
======
mattwdelong
Gamification of SEO killed online reviews.

More and more people are "understanding" how SEO works and they're simply
manipulating it. By ranking early for a keyword that has yet to gain
popularity, they stand a chance at getting a lot of traffic for a short period
of time, early on. One can assume this is to earn ad revenue from the traffic
but it's obviously not a sustainable method as the more reputable sites will
gain favorable rankings quickly. These are the same people that will earn
100's of $$ from their website per month, and sell it on Flippa.com for 6-12x
their monthly income. Then they build a new site, and repeat.

I am currently working in the automotive distribution industry, and pretty
much any automotive site you find is using this method of maniplation. It
sucks.

An example; Just type in 2014 BMW 3 Series, 2015 BMW 3 Series and 2016 BMW 3
Series to see people using this method of maniplation.

~~~
AJ007
As SEO is blamed, so one could also blame the existance of search engines
themselves. What this really has to do with is "meeting consumer demand."

It just happens, not by coincidence, that there is a lot less competition in
areas where the end product doesn't actually exist.

Last month I tried to reverse look up a phone number with Intelius. They tried
to upsell me a bunch of monthly subscriptions, and then told me the phone
number wasn't actually in their system but they would look for it. I was to
expect an answer in 3 days. 9 days later they said they couldn't find it and
refunded my charge.

Intelius knew they wouldn't be able to have that number. But, they knew there
was an X% chance I'd sign up for their monthly recurring service; something I
suspect would not have been refunded.

There are plenty of other businesses making money selling things that don't
exist. Some are arguably legitimate, such as Kickstarter. Others, such as
pyramid schemes, are quite less so.

~~~
mattwdelong
In my opinion, you're not entirely wrong nor are you right.

For one, I don't think that ranking for 2015 BMW 3 Series (my former example)
is meeting any demand. The car does not even exist yet; I'm not even sure if
BMW would even be working on it at the moment. How can that be meeting demand?

The example you gave with intelius is not entirely wrong persay; as they did
"try" to perform a valuable service in the end. However, what if a random
nefarious individual started ranking for non-existant phone numbers, took your
money, and ran?

Gamification of SEO is a slippery slope. Sometimes it's useful and other times
it goes horribly wrong. It comes down human intentions and search engine
sorting out the good vs the bad, I guess. I have not yet known a machine to
determine human intention.

~~~
rhizome
It doesn't really matter whether intent can be divined, because perverse
incentives can be engineered out of the system if the resources and will are
present.

Did Intelius "try," or did they get free 9 day loan?

------
danso
I don't see how SEO is to blame for this. Shitty publications will always
write inaccurate, linkbait headlines...or "eye-bait", before the Internet
existed.

This gives an opening to sites that put real work into their editorial
content. Unless I'm trying to get a gauge of some random non-heavily-promoted
product (like earphones) that I find on sale...I will always go to a trusted
site for review. Life is too short to parse through random reviews from
untrusted parties as it is, even if none of them are "fake" reviews.

EDIT:

Here's an example. DPReview is almost always the last major reviewer to cover
a camera. Yet they are at the top of the search results for pretty much every
camera they review

[https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=0&source...](https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=review+canon5d%20mark%20III#hl=en&sclient=psy-
ab&q=review+canon+5d+mark+III&oq=review+canon+5d+mark+III)

~~~
minouye
There's a link to DPReview in the footer of every single Amazon.com page. If
that's not a good signal for a search engine then I don't know what is.

~~~
morsch
Huh, so there is. Amazon bought them in 2007. I've been reading DPReview
constantly, but I never knew that.

~~~
danso
And I've also learned that today. So I guess they're not the best example
here...

------
benvanderbeek
Amazon review fraud is rampant, and with enough effort, they'll do something
about it. I've worked w/teams there who, over time, develop very complex
queries on the back end, and use these to remove sellers who violate policy.
There are all kinds of additional tricks sellers or manufacturers use to make
their reviews look legit, such as using Amazon gift cards to prevent tracing
back to a specific credit card holder, and to ensure the "Verified Amazon
Purchase" indicator shows on the review. Helpful votes are crucial and there
seem to be very complex rules behind which votes get counted and which don't.
Some combination of accounts being related via credit card on file, IP
address, possibly length of user account history, etc. One difficulty for
Amazon is that their community review policing department is disconnected from
their seller performance team. My company's work with them has improved the
communication, as well as the realization that user accounts that leave
fraudulent reviews cannot be treated as merely rogue buyer community members,
but rather have to be tied back to sellers and manufacturers who are the real
benefactors of these fraudulent (positive or negative) reviews.

We've come a long way from manufacturers blatantly paying people for positive
reviews. [http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-
belki...](http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-belkins-
development-rep-is-hiring-people-to-write-fake-positive-amazon-reviews/)

------
ZanderEarth32
I don't really see how this relates to SEO at all. If anything, this is link
bait.

It has more to do with publications writing unsupported reviews for products
trying to get clicks. This is no different than tabloids printing
sensationalized headlines to get eyes when you're standing in line at the
grocery store.

I just ran a search for 'Nintendo Wii U' and the whole front page contains
none of these types of articles reviewing the Wii U. The front page has
articles from ABC News, e3, Youtube, Amazon, etc. If someone is searching for
'Nintendo Wii U Reviews' and the results return the only page's available that
display themselves as 'reviews' then who's fault is that? The searcher, who is
uninformed enough to not realize that the Wii U can't be reviewed yet because
it is not available, or Google, who assumes the searcher wants to find reviews
for the Wii U, regardless of their validity?

If I search for 'aliens are real' I get results that support my search query
which assumes aliens are real. It's not Google's job to decide if 'aliens are
real' or not. It's job is to return relevant results for what I searched for.
If I want 'Wii U Reviews' then I'll get reviews, regardless if they are valid
or not.

~~~
galactus
Of course it has to do with SEO. The reason to write those fake reviews is not
(only) to get people reading those before the product is out, but mostly to
have better google rankings (page age seems to have some weight).

~~~
ZanderEarth32
This might be true, but once the Wii U starts to receive legitimate reviews
from credible sources, these 'faux' reviews will be crushed by the authority
of Gamespot, CNET, etc. providing real reviews that are accumulating great
number links. Right now, these fake reviews are killing the SERPs because
there is nothing else to return for reviews of the Wii.

------
sofal
When you're looking to buy a product that isn't the kind of thing reviewed by
sites you already know, it can be hard to find where credible sources are.
What I generally try to do is start by adding "forum" to my search query with
the goal of finding a group of hobbyists somewhere. If I can find a discussion
among hobbyists that is somewhat related to the product I want, then often
they will mention the sites they're reading or buying from. Usually there will
be a couple of brands that get fought over, and if nothing else it can help
discover better search terms.

~~~
vaksel
you don't need to add forum, in Google click more on the left side, and then
select "discussions"...and it'll limit the results to just forums/message
boards etc

------
ChuckMcM
"For consumers my main advice would be to find a website that you can trust
and stick with it."

This was one of the founding principles of the slashtag system at Blekko.com.
Pure algorithmic search fails in highly contested search queries because of
the people trying to game results. The idea is that if you've got a slashtag
with your favorite review sites in it you can have that auto-boosted in your
regular search results and 'ungame' the gamers.

------
PaulHoule
Yeah, the best SEO coup I ever made was when I covered a news story a few days
before it happened and got 40,000 hits because I ranked #1 for it when it got
on TV news.

(How did I cover it before it happened? Because this event was one of a series
of events, and I had covered an earlier event at the same place involving the
same people that wasn't quite so outrageous)

~~~
AznHisoka
1) Create page with title "<COUNTRY NAME> 2012 tsunami" for all countries in
the world 2) ??? 3) Profit.

------
rdc
I find it ironic that a company that offers SEO services would send followed
OB links to sites that they claim are harming the web.

------
robertp
"query deserves freshness" is part of Google's algorithm so it knows to rank
the newest articles at the top. It works great for news driven sites, works
bad for e-commerce type sites that restock older items but they get outranked
by a news site.

------
sandycheeks
It has been years since providing SEO services for a client meant 'make and
market a website in the best way to accurately be indexed by search engines'.

Now it seems to mean 'make a website rank higher than it should in search
engines'.

------
sp332
It's important to find a reviewer you can trust in an area. I used to like Ben
Kuchera's video game reviews at Ars Technica, Anandtech for hardware and Geek
Brief (now Geek Beat) for random gadgets.

~~~
alecco
Yes, but those guys are losing the eyeballs of the masses with the borderline-
fake SEO-oriented reviews. As the OP states, if the trend continues they will
disappear.

~~~
magicalist
It's not a terribly recent trend, though, and some sites are still
flourishing, so it's not inevitable.

It's worth noting that Ben carved out his section of Ars Technica himself,
basically proving the value of his paycheck by starting to write content and
bringing in the readers. Prior to that, gaming coverage on Ars was extremely
light to nonexistent. Now Kyle Orland is keeping up Ars's gaming coverage, and
Ben has started another gaming coverage site at Penny Arcade.

Both are using an existing, relatively successful property to bootstrap, but
that's fairly common in any business (the property may be called "your
investors"), and coverage there and other places has arguably opened up a
market for more independent game coverage.

------
gojomo
The web may need a social, distributed 'demerit' system which can punish
subtle abuses faster than Google: a downvote button that works anywhere, and
is somewhat gaming-resistant. (Even being just lightly more resistant than
current keyword-squatting, click-baiting, link-whoring would be a marginal
win.)

Zed Shaw's 'Utu'/<http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com> is one exploration of
this concept.

------
garrett_smith
There's a big opportunity to solve this problem. I've always thought that a
combination of expert reviews, combined with user reviews and those found on
other reliable sources (Yelp, Amazon, etc) that were weighted via an algorithm
could provide a more fair "review score" for products and services. Just like
anything, the more data you get, the easier it is to provide a fair
quantitative assessment.

------
dmethvin
So, don't trust reviews from sources you don't know. That's where social
networks can help.

------
gwern
> Yes the official Nintendo magazine is impartial so this probably isn’t a
> deliberate strategy by the brand.

Impartial? Not unless things have changed a great deal from when I was reading
_Nintendo Power_ in the early 2000s...

------
emmelaich
I think gamification of SEO is killing all kinds of search, and this is part
of why Google is investing in social search and G+.

Links are have more value when they're connected to a person's reputation.

------
dzhiurgis
The only bad thing I can see is that the first-movers are stupid enough not to
update the reviews when new version or whatever changes comes out.

------
planetguy
While there's certainly a lot of crap out there, the example used is weird.
Yep, if you search for reviews for a product for which no credible reviews
exist yet (due to it being unreleased), you're going to find garbage.

Search for reviews for a product which _actually exists_ , and you might get
some better results. Drop the "U" from "Nintendo Wii Review" and you'll find
reviews as sensible as you could hope for.

~~~
spitfire
Try finding a review for any printer. or a car. or most cell phones. It's all
link bait tar-pit SEO sites. This is what the article is talking about and
he's absolutely right.

However, this does bring in an opportunity for someone to displace google. Not
with better search but with better find-what-I'm-looking-for engines.

~~~
magicalist
have you tried that? I don't know if it's changed recently or not, but I just
tried some searches for reviews of a printer, a car, and a cellphone and got
all seemingly reputable links on the first page.

<https://www.google.com/search?q=hp+officejet+pro+8600+review>

<https://www.google.com/search?q=2012+BMW+3+Series+reviews>

<https://www.google.com/search?q=lg+nitro+hd+review>

(these seemed like fairly typical products you might search for in these
categories...I don't actually know any of them very well)

Now, that's not to say that cnet is the best place to get reviews, but it
definitely isn't anywhere near as bad as the sites I seem to remember review
queries formerly returning.

What we really need is a good way of searching for those really good review
sites that people who know about them absolutely trust. I can't think of any
way to structure a query that might get me from looking for a camera to
danso's endorsement of DPReview above. Narrowing to forums might help get you
there, but it would be nice to not have to open a bunch of discussion pages
and scan for decent seeming sites.

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its_so_on
you might also find my earlier comment relevant -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972595>

I think that fake reviews (shilling) is a special class of problem. I don't
believe it fits any of the normal categories of fraud (i.e. that's why I was
happy it kind of was artificially added there) and yet I believe that what we
lose by not regulating it is an important enough commons that it should be
protected.

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paulgpmd
Congrats on making it to the first page! :)

