Google wants to show users how a service has been rated by people. Sounds ok, right?
<snip>
Now the problem is that the reviews that are counted toward this score are hosted on the site of the service / product provider and there are no further requirements than there being 1 to 5 stars present. - No vetting, no checking if there is an actual way for users to submit reviews and if they actually show up... NOTHING.
Honestly, I am SICK and tired of competing against people that have 5 stars in their snippet, just because I dont want to be a scumbag!
I am competing against sites that have literally 100+ 5 star reviews on every single product page. 0 4star reviews 0 3star ect... the most obvious fakes you can imagine. And still they get a better CTR than me, because they have 5 stars in their snippet. I report them for spammy snippets, but NOTHING happens, because the utterly inept reviewers look at one page and not the whole site with 50k+ 5 star reviews and 0 reviews that are not 5 stars.
Google does a good job filtering spammy links... well bravo.... but you filter nothing else at all.
For Heavens Sake, there are Wordpres and Joomla Plugins that allow you to implement fake review scores that can be adjusted in the backend! They advertise with google 5 star snippets as a FEATURE!
Am I the only one? Is this not totally naive of Google to do?
[edited by: goodroi at 12:18 pm (utc) on Feb 18, 2017]
[edit reason] Please no specifics as per forum charter [/edit]
