You shouldn’t believe everything you read. And if you’re reading online reviews of products, hotels, restaurants, or local businesses or services? Then you should believe even less. It’s obviously in the best interests of a business to boost its online ratings. Good reviews and top ratings draw in customers, and also help businesses land higher results in online searches. Online reviews are so important that businesses have been known to plant reviews by employees, pay strangers who have never been customers to write five-star reviews, and even sabotage their competitors by the posting of harsh, negative reviews. At the same time, it’s obviously in the interests of sites that host reviews and ratings—Yelp, Amazon, TripAdvisor, RateMDs, and so on—to root out the frauds, and maintain a semblance of trust with their users. By most accounts, these sites try their best. Yelp actually has a reputation for aggressively filtering out all sorts of suspicious reviews; its algorithms successfully flagged the vast majority of fake reviews planted at the site during one experiment last year. Even so, there are plenty of reasons why it’s unwise to accept online reviews at face value and think you’re getting the 100% honest truth. Such as: The marketplace for fake reviews operates fairly openly. Sites such as Freelancer.com welcome businesses to offer menial-paying jobs for writing fake reviews, and there are plenty of fake review writers offering their services at Fiverr.com, usually to the tune of $5 for each glowingly positive review. (MORE: Meet the Puppet Who Made $11,000 from Silly Online Videos Last Year) Companies give freebies in exchange for reviews. A New York Times story reported that a company called VIP Deals had been reimbursing customers for their tablet case purchases if they posted a review of the product on Amazon. And wouldn’t you know? At one point, 310 out of the 335 product’s reviews received five stars. Even if you think you can spot fake reviews, you probably can’t. Cornell researchers created software to detect “opinion spam” (fake online reviews) in a pool of … Continue reading 9 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Trust Online Reviews