In this article, we will learn how to identify fake user reviews from real ones. Understand on which sites you can get true information about the company, and which are better to avoid. Let’s do it together!
After looking at many resume writing services reviews, it is difficult to know which are fake and which are real. After all, one has to account for the odd way people write and think. For example, there are positive reviews online for the movie Speed 2. It is almost universally agreed that this is the worst Hollywood movie ever, and yet that are positive reviews on the web for it. Are they all fake? Possibly, but there may also have been some people out there who actually liked it. This is half the problem because some positive reviews for resume sites may be fake, and other fake-looking reviews may be genuine.
There are bloggers and webmasters out there that wish to promote resume services for affiliate money payments, and the only way they can do that is to trash the competition. How can you tell, and what can you do?
Review Sites Where Replies Are Censored Or Blocked
Maybe you are searching for resume writing services reviews and you come across a blog post comparing five different companies. Does the blog have a comment section? Are people able to reply to the comments?
To muddy the water further, some webmasters and bloggers will remove any comments that contradict the overall review. Nevertheless, if the webmaster or blogger is censoring or removing any rebuttals, then start looking elsewhere.
Affiliate Marketers Who Trash Other Companies
One way to make money is to create a resume services review site reviewing companies that pay affiliate money. If a viewer reads the review and then clicks on a link or makes a purchase, the reviewer gets a payment.
Meet Billy, he’s an independent webmaster who has registered as an affiliate for resume company ABC. Company ABC is promising Billy 50$ from each sale done from Billy’s review of their services. So, Billy goes to a freelance website, finds a writer who writes a fake review (company ABC might be a good one even, but in all honesty most likely neither the writer, not Billy will ever bother to check) and a bunch of negative ones for Company ABC’s competitors. So, the unsuspecting visitor to Billy’s review site will read the positive review and a bunch of negatives and will go and place his order with Company ABC. It’s a win for Billy (50$, remember?), and for the Company (a new customer). Sounds rather harmless, until webmasters like Billy get greedy and start employing dishonest marketing practices to get more visitors to their review site. This can range from fake negative reviews of truly good and deserving companies to blackhat SEO to grow their site position fast.
What About A SiteJabber Or TrustPilot Reviews?
In these cases, the webmasters themselves have less incentive to remove positive/negative reviews, and they have less reason to manipulate what you see in order to make a single service look good. This means that if you see negative or positive reviews on these sites, they are more likely to be real.
Customers who post user reviews on SiteJabber or Trust Pilot, usually write truthful reviews because they need to register, spend their time writing reviews, and go through moderation. And moderators, as a rule, have long learned to distinguish real reviews from fake ones. So, you can trust such independence review services like Sitejabber, Trustpilot, etc.
Here are examples of truthful Resumeble reviews from real users on TrustPilot and SiteJabber.
How To Spot Fake User Reviews?
There are a few obvious telltale signs. For example, with some websites, you can see how somebody has quickly set up an account, added no image, not added a real name, and has quickly written a review and it is the only review the user has ever left on the site. Here are a few other telltale signs:
Rather Un-Creative Reviews
They are un-creative for two reasons. The first is because paid fake reviewers are often given a brief, and that brief restricts their creativity because they are only given five or six selling points to work with. The second reason is that writing the same reviews over and over again results in a sort of auto-pilot writing that is stale and un-creative. Are they obsessing over unimportant points like 24/7 support, responsive website, or a typo on a home page? Do they write something that doesn’t correspond with the reviewed site? Do they show the samples of the product they received from the reviewed site (most likely they don’t)? Are they upfront about their affiliate set-up or not?
Repetitive use of phrases
Another common result of writers having to write the same reviews over and over again is that they run out of descriptive words and phrases and so they accidentally start repeating themselves.
Outright promotional
Some fake reviews are so promotional they almost sound like a chirpy-speedily-spoken radio ad. For example, if you were writing real reviews, would you offer six or seven descriptive words followed by a call to action, or would you write about your experience, your thoughts, and what you got out of it.
Quoting Negatives That Are Actually Positives
The level of smugness that often comes with these types of fake reviews is ridiculous. They will complain about things that are not actually complaints, like, “They made me wait 4 minutes for my cab” or “They only threw in six free gifts.”
Silly Misrepresentations
These take all shapes and forms, from people on Yelp claiming that they found a mouse in their soup in a restaurant, to people claiming that a loan hacker can wipe their credit rating. Typical misrepresentations regarding resumes may be claims that the resume got them a job in 24 hours, or that they had been unemployed for 20 years until resume-writer-blah-blah came along. They may also tell silly lies by claiming that the resume-writing company’s prices are cheap even though their lowest prices are in the hundreds.
Do You Ever Learn To Spot Fake Reviews?
Oddly enough, the easiest way to learn how to spot them is to write hundreds of them yourself. After a while, you settle into the same habits that other fake-review writers settle into, and you learn to spot the most common fake-review mistakes.
The fact is that there are always going to be people who post fake reviews and benefit from them. If you are a fan of torrent sites, you will see people write comments such as, “Jeeze, if they had invested as much time into making the movie as they did writing fake reviews, then maybe I would have enjoyed it.” If you are looking for a great place to see and spot fake reviews, then go looking for e-books on Amazon. You will see tens of positive reviews for a book, and then two or three angry reviews from people who bought the book. Not only will you learn how to spot fake reviews, but you will also have a little fun as you read the angry ones ;)
