Are Google reviews safe?

There is a legitimate business that does not have many Google reviews, however it shows up first on the local pack when looking up its' keyword. It's sure that purchasing reviews would increase the amount of calls it gets, but how safe is doing so?

Things that are being considered

• Google is very intelligent and is the leader in AI.
• The average legitimate user's gmail account is most likely ~6 years old
• Google probably has a good idea of what people exist, even if they don't have a google account.
• What Google doesn't care about now, might change in the future.

If a majority of the accounts who leave reviews on this business are 2 years old, that in itself is weird.

If the majority of accounts who leave reviews on this business are people who google has no other information on, that might be suspicious. (Google knows what countries I've been to, what restaurants I frequent, what I regularly search for, what music I listen to, what brand of laundry detergent I buy, etc...).

So some would say that it Google doesn't care enough to compute all of this stuff together. Well, computing power is increasingly exponentially so soon enough it wouldn't make sense for them not to compute it all together.

I had a couple other points but now I'm going blank.

So what do you guys think? If you had a business that were the single thing that you were counting on, would you buy Google reviews for it?

I ran a small hotel for about a year or so, so let me tell you my experience.

I believe, and this only a personal hypothesis, that Google's algorithm only bothers if you're spamming, go lazy/greedy/cheap, or make it obvious your reviews are fake. They can't "punish" you for having fake reviews as this could be a double edged sword, for if that's the case I'll just buy review for my competitors and watch them drop one by one. (Of course it's a little more complicated than that.)

I went by the idea that, if the average Joe cant tell something is fake, then Google algorithm is not gonna bother and I never had an issue. I went very slow and was very careful and sceptical of the peoviders, and tested multiple ones, I also kept it as realistic as possible, and always kept 10 - 25% negative reviews with 2 -3% being 1 star so I don't raise people's expectations too much which will inevitably hurt my business.

You'll need to experiment, every industry is gonna be a little different, like if I'm looking for a lawer or a therapist I'm gonna read every review they have, but if it's a fast food restaurant I'm not really gonna bother & just pick whoever appears to provide the most value.

My suggestion to you if you don't own the business or don't wanna take the risk, to go hire someone experienced to do this for you a lot of things can go wrong and the consequences will be huge, as with brick & mortar you cant just buy another domain and start over. Warren Buffet once said it takes 30 years to build a reputation and 3 minutes to ruin it (or something like that) if you mess up and the public gets the word that you're trying to decieve them the business is doomed.

Also I'd guess the average email lifespan is more of 12-24 months, being shorter the younger the user is, as people keep signing up for trials and stuff like that. Only a guess though.

Also Google can't keep track of a lot of users including apple users.

Best of luck


Note: this sounds like a sales funnel with the quote and stuff lol I'm not selling or providing anything.

firstnamelastname said:

I would not buy reviews from a seller. because if they are selling to you, chances are they are selling to a few other people and chances are they are not careful about footprints. it's like fucking a prostitute, you don't know who she fucked last night.
example:
gmail account A leaves a review for client 1 and client 2
gmail account B also leaves a review for client 1 and client 2
gmail account C also leaves a review for client 1 and client 2

you dont have to be a genius to detect the footprint.

I would just get a hold of individuals who have aged accounts and pay them to leave a review. how you get a hold of them depends on your own creativity.

I know someone in real life who has the balls to go to random strangers at coffee shops, restaurants and asks them for a review, and doesn't even pay anything. I don't have the balls to do that.

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Yeah that's a good point too.

I wouldn't want to do that because they might say "Yeah" then later change it to be like "This guy randomly came up to me at a coffee shop and asked me to leave a review" haha.

pankajjangir said:

You can rank a local page by creating backlink for that.

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Said page with less than 3 reviews ranks above local businesses that have 90+ reviews, 4.8 star avg. It's just that people are still calling the second and third ones down instead of said business because they have a lot more reviews.

spitfire19 said:

I've had no problem leaving reviews with my 15 local guide accounts. The key is to diversify the reviews and use aged accounts. Some of mine are from the beta days which helps!

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You seem to have your own accounts, a lot of which are local guides. You know where they've been, what they've done, etc... And while I suspect that google could compute (if it wanted to) that there is foul play involved, at least for the time being I doubt that they do. What I've mentioned in the original post and have since decided against is purchasing reviews from another service where I couldn't know anything about the accounts.

Then again, if Google were to penalize sites for fake reviews then negative local SEO would be much easier so who knows.