You got a bad reviews online and you’re freaked out what now?

After you calm down and dry your best google reviews eyes you look around for viable solution to this pain such as hiring a reputation management service to take care of these painful bad reviews.

There are several solutions to bad reviews but if you are looking for long term solution then don’t do the following review strategy:

Fake reviews

Fake Reviews – I would never post such a thing online you cry!

No one thinks for one second a business owner such as yourself would participate in such a seedy response which incidentally not only goes against the terms of service of Google, Yahoo and Bing, but it also goes against the terms of service of the local business directories such as yelp, CitySearch or MapQuest etc.

So how are these fake reviews finding themselves posted online?

Reputation management companies in their frenzy to grab fast cash from business owners who are freaked out and in pain from a couple of bad reviews are posting fake reviews in an effort to bury the bad reviews.

In theory this is a wonderful idea, the reputation service gets paid good money and the businesses owner gets lots of great five-star reviews. Not only does the bad reviews get buried but all those great reviews also make the business look great so it gets lots more FREE traffic as a result.

Here’s the problem: Filters!

The search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are constantly upgrading their algorithms to seek out and filter out fake reviews. So one day you will be riding high on the search engines and your phone will be ringing all day long but when those filters especially the Google filter finds your fake reviews you will be none the wiser because it happens silently in the night.

At first you’ll wonder why the phone’s not ringing as much but after a few days you’ll check out your web presence then be shocked to discover all your reviews will be gone.

I hear you screaming in my ear they were not all fake reviews some of them I got from my satisfied customers and satisfied clients and we posted them online we had permission.

Here’s the kicker how does Google and the other search engines know the difference from a fake review and real review you posted?

Remember the algorithm it’s looking for many different things to determine if a review is fake or real such as