Best way to handle negative reviews left by competitor?

[Angie Jensen]

[FONT=Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial]I have a client who had a competitor leave some very, very negative and nasty reviews. We can prove that all three reviews were made by the same person and that the person is a friend of the competitor. I want to make sure my client is able to report this in the most effective way possible and was wondering if they should just go through the report the review link or if there were some other steps they should take. Thanks for any help! [/FONT]

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Try posting your "case" to the Google and Your Business Forum.

No guarantees, but it might catch the eye of somebody at Google.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for posting Ang. Thanks for helping Colan.

Angie is "family" and I told her I'm crazed with my tech probs so to post here for help.

If anyone has any other advice to help that would be great.

Ang if you post at G forum email me link and when I get time I can review and if appropriate I may be able to escalate.

Leaving to pick up PCs, then under gun to get new PCs up and working as this one keeps crashing too. So tied up rest of day trying to get everything configured/working.

 

[Angie Jensen]

Thanks so much! I will do that.

 

[jonkeel]

Hi Angie:

When we're preparing responses to negative reviews for our clients and we "know" that the reviewer is not a customer, we include wording in the response along the lines of "we've searched through our customer/client/patient database and can't find a record of this person/your being to our office. If we've somehow mislabeled you in our customer/client/patient database please let us know. And obviously, since our goal is to always provide first class service, when you contact us we will work out a solution that will be acceptable to you" or something like that.

Hope this helps.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Jon! Nicely worded!

 

[Phil Rozek]

My clients have been pretty lucky in terms of not getting attacked by competitors? fake reviews, and I haven?t tried this, but one thing I think would be good to add to a response is something along the lines of:

?Note to anyone else reading this: We?re 99.9% sure the above review wasn?t written by a real customer of ours. If you?d like to learn more about who we think wrote the review and why, or if you just have some questions about us or our policies, please feel free to contact us at _______.?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Angie,

Just did this new post with you in mind.

Great tips including how to go up the chain to Google legal if you need to.
http://localsearchforum.catalystema...931-how-remove-slanderous-google-reviews.html

 

[flyer85]

Dear All

My first post here. Thanks in advance for replies as those in the thread so far, on how to respond, have been very useful.

I need to raise an issue I have whereby there is a very damaging forum thread which we believe is fabricated by a competitor.

It is ranking highly on Google, and each time the thread dies out, we have another, random person opening an account and posting on there. I try to contact them via the private message system...nothing. The language used is typical of that used by a well-known competitor of mine...and third parties who know the individual agree. He is a very unscrupulous businessperson.

Is there any department at Google I could contact directly as I don't seem to be getting anywhere? Lawyers say that the title is misleading and therefore Google could force an amended title or outright removal from the search listings...but they want to charge ??? for this!

I thought it would be simpler to simply raise the issue direct with someone at Google? Any ideas on where, or how? Or even if it would be successful?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@flyer85

There's not much you can do, based on my understanding of your situation. If your competitor were posting reviews on the property of Google - i.e. Google+ - then you'd have some recourse. But Google doesn't and won't do much policing of search results that it simply indexes.

For me, the question is: how prominent is the forum thread you mention? Is it right there on the first page when someone searches for your business by name? If so, maybe it's time to bite the bullet and get help from a lawyer. If not, it's hard for me to picture the thread being a great drag on your reputation - if it's just buried somewhere.

 

[flyer85]

Hi there

thanks for the post.

It's right in position 2 at the moment, page 1!

As we're quite a new company still, and the forum is a powerful one in our sector, it's climbed to that pos'n very easily.

The lawyers I have engaged so far suggest that Google may remove it since the title of the thread which implies "problems" in the company, is misleading.

 

[Laustin1878]

The obvious answer is to figure out a way to move that site down in the search results. Make sure your site is ranking above it. Find additional review sites that rank well and be sure to have your customers start publishing reviews on some sites other then Google. As to how you go about moving the site down in the rankings, that's another story and I'd be interested in hearing about that.

You may consider starting another thread as it appears this thread is more about handling negative reviews left on Google vs. non-google websites. You may get a better response if you separate the thread.

 

[Dave]

We've received negative attack reviews from a competitor(s). They hit google, yelp, and yahoo local. They all came at about the same time and all had roughly the same message, though delivered by 3 different identities:

We couldn't pin the evidence but we responded more or less as follows.

A) We suspect this is an attack review planted by a competitor:
B) The reasons why
C) We did check about the identity of one of them and of course couldn't tie the review persona with a real person. We added that to the response.
D) In the case(s) we had we added some rebuttal in that negated the negative comments and invited customers to see for themselves.

We contacted the competitor. We let them know if they did this again they would take a "far worse hit"

It was several years ago. They haven't tried anything since.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Dave

You handled that like a boss