Many businesses have a kind of love-hate relationship with online reviews, because while they can be extremely helpful when it comes to driving traffic and increasing conversion rates, it is also possible for unfairly negative comments to have a detrimental effect.
This is compounded by the fact that it can be difficult to get malicious and inaccurate reviews removed from influential online outlets, while the veil of anonymity makes it hard for the culprits to be identified.
Google has made a big thing of allowing its users to review businesses directly, thus making the ratings accessible to searchers and giving an indication as to whether or not it might be worth visiting a site and becoming a customer of a particular firm.
This is all well and good, in addition to being the kind of feature you would expect to find on the world’s most popular search engine. However, complaints within the SEO community have begun to emerge, in relation to the fact that Google still makes it possible for people to anonymously post reviews of businesses.
This lack of direct attribution to a user is problematic for some of the aforementioned reasons, but is also indicative of a wider trend, which makes webmasters very nervous about online reviews, rather than embracing their nascent positive nature.
An article from Search Engine, Roundtable, points out that several business owners have been logging on to Google’s help forums in order to express their opinions on and concerns with the matter.
Companies are using social networking sites like Twitter and Google+ in order to encourage customers to post reviews online. However, it is currently possible for reviewers to simply be listed as ‘A Google User’ when they publish their opinions, even if they are logged in via their own account, which is, of course, a requirement of being able to make a post.
Search Engine Roundtable points out that this is not an example of an isolated incident of reviewer anonymity, but has in fact been an ongoing issue afflicting Google’s services for the past few months.
In this scenario, it is not necessarily the content of the reviews that are the issue, but rather the way in which they are presented and the clear lack of accountability which comes from being able to post anonymously.
It may seem trivial, but when an online review can be the difference between a flurry of site activity and sales or a slow period, during which people are put off from using your business and instead turn to a competitor, the seriousness becomes apparent.
Google is thought to be working on a fix for the lack of usernames associated with reviews, although a schedule or deadline for its implementation remains unknown.
Meanwhile, there are a myriad of other methods for posting business reviews available to online customers, some of which can be easier to exploit than others. Hopefully, this area will become more stable and advantageous, as the tools mature.