fight against fake reviews

Great site, newly registered but I have been reading lots of posts on here for a while. Thank you to everyone that has posted.

Anyways, I have a client that has a service business in a small market 100k people. He has a good site with quality information and fair number of backlinks. He has recently been dropped in ranking from 1 to 2 due to another company. I looked at everything the other site is doing and it boils down to one thing. He goes all over the internet and writes fake reviews. Places like yp., superpages, yahoo, google local, and every directory you could think of. He has over 50 reviews on yahoo and the closest company has 10. On yelp he has 3 reviews showing and 13 filtered. Even reading the reviews it is easy to tell that he has a firm in another country writing them for him because the grammar isn't correct or even understandable sometimes.

Google is giving high weight to this company because search volume for the specific keywords is low and he has citations from these directories.

What would you do? My client doesn't want to play the same game because he runs an ethical business and doesn't want a black eye like that floating around the internet.

What kind of ethical business wants to leave money on the table?

math182 said:

What kind of ethical business wants to leave money on the table?

Click to expand...

You forgot your /S tag.

Unless you can find proof it's him you can't do anything realistically except flag his fake reviews and dispute them w/ the respective sites.

You may wish to launch a pro-active and retro-active reputation management and defense campaign respectively.

If you can find proof it's him, hire a lawyer and file a Cease & Desist letter and then proceed to legal action.

I am a little confused on the last post. The fake reviews are not negative ones against my client they are fake positive ones for the competition. I think it would be very hard to file a lawsuit against that.

I will attempt to flag his reviews on the various sites though. Thank you for the advice, I really do appreciate it.

I got this same exact problem, and it's actually a huge problem just like in your case.
I'm ranking #2 while the d*ckhead ranks #1.

I'm getting customers all the time that went to my competitor first because of the numerous fake positive reviews, but they turn to me when they realize the scam.
I didn't also want to go the unethical way and I've begged returning happy clients to, please leave a positive review for me if you're happy with my services.
Would help me and others a lot.

I've even tried to offer satisfied customers discounts for their second order if they leave a positive review, but in my case, it hasn't helped.
So my suggestion to you is to maybe give it a shot and if it's not working do your own fake positive reviews.

If ya can't beat 'em, join 'em!