Silvery - 5:54 pm on Jul 15, 2009 (gmt 0)

There are viable, valid ways to encourage your customers to provide you with positive reviews (without bribing!) - it's terribly shortsighted to try to manipulate consumers through fraudulent representations like this.

Most small-to-medium businesses which I work with have few-to-no reviews in various online business directories. Simply asking your happiest customers to rate you in Yelp, Superpages, Yahoo, and Google Maps can result in a pretty rapid expansion of good reviews. And, there are other means.

Very interesting that such behavior can result in such substantial penalties! Most people seem to figure that what they do on the internet "doesn't count" so much.