Businesses Sabotaged by Negative Reviews

Here's a story that could unfortunately become more common if Google doesn't make some major changes. Recently some negative 1-star reviews started popping up on the Place Page of a moving company in New York. Day after day more of these reviews would surface The business owner did what they could and repeatedly clicked the flag as inappropriate button to have Google remove the review.

Soon this business owner called some of their friends in the business and found out that they too had the same 1-star reviews popping up on their pages as well. The reviews were all very similar and often had the wrong company's name in them.

When the business owners did a Google search targeting a specific phrase from the review, they found that over a hundred moving companies across the country had all been hit with the same reviews.

Here's the kicker...shortly after all the reviews had been posted, many of the moving companies received emails from reputation management companies claiming they could remove malicious reviews! Reputation management has become a largely growing market riding on the tail of social networking. This is not news to you as we've covered this many times.

Many of these companies offer to add positive reviews about your company for you, an act which some disagree with. Some even claim they can remove reviews for you, something that essentially cannot be done. There are even companies that will go so far as to suggest they have a special relationship with Google, which they don't.

Now it appears some of these same reputable companies are taking it TOO far by posting fake negative reviews and then offering to take them down, holding your reputation for ransom. This is like lighting your house of fire and then offering to put it out, for a small fee of course.

So where's Google in all this? Well they're aware of the situation and are in the process of taking down the negative reviews. For some reason it takes Google, a multibillion dollar company, a while to tak...