related...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56321576UK businesses caught buying five-star Google reviewshttps://www.bbc.com/news/business-57608138Amazon and Google probed over efforts to stop fake reviewsIt's not always the merchant. As I mentioned before, for a while we were getting a bunch of fake 4-5 star reviews for our rental on Google because they were giving points to "Google Guides" for every review posted. So they were just randomly reviewing properties to rack up points.
The problem from my point of view was that the review text was nonsensical and while many businesses would be happy with a 4-star review, in our case that brings our average down. So our average from bona fide reviews from actual customers on Airbnb and Vrbo was 5.0, but our average on Google was like 4.3 for a while and only one of 10 reviews had actually ever been there. I ended up figuring out how to report them and have them removed.
