You may be reading this because someone posted a fake online review about your business. In this post, we cover exactly how to handle it. Even well-managed businesses have off days, so the occasional negative online review is a regular part of doing business.
However, false and defamatory reviews can be irritating, infuriating, and damaging to your bottom line. If angry customers, disgruntled ex-employees, or competitors post inaccurate reviews of your business online, you don’t have to just take it: You can fight back without causing further harm to your reputation.
Key Takeaways
- To take action against a fake review, you have to know how to spot it. Look for suspicious timestamps, phrases, and account details.
- Pause and process before you do anything, to make sure that you show your customers your best self.
- To report fake reviews, follow every platform’s steps. Facebook, Yelp, and Google have easy-to-follow steps.
- Consider a public response. Responding has pros and cons, but doing so the right way can help you recover your reputation in front of potential customers.
- If all else fails, you can deal with fake reviews by attracting a ton of new ones. Reputation management software can make that easy.
Spotting a Fake Review: What to Look For
Not every suspicious review is fake. As the Consumer Reports organization lets you know, fake reviews are typically marked by one or several signs.
- Clustered timestamps: Bad or good reviews may come in large clusters all at the same time. This is usually a sign that they have been produced and uploaded in a built set.
- Repeated phrases: When negative customer reviews repeat the same specific complaints, it may be a sign that an angry customer or former employee is trying to flood you with negative reviews.
- Sketchy review histories: Check the review histories of strange users leaving reviews on your pages. Their profile may contain hints that they are bots, such as ridiculous numbers of reviews or reviews that span tiny businesses around the globe.
Documenting any of these signs to review site administrators may help you speed up any takedown requests you file. Make sure to take screenshots of evidence in case it is deleted. Now, you’re ready to start taking action against fake reviews. One of the first things you need to do is simply take a step back.
Step 1: Pause and Process Before You React
It’s natural to feel angry and defensive when someone spreads lies about your business, but taking steps while emotional can backfire. Pausing gives you time to implement the policies you have in place for responding to reviews (which are developed by calm people for a reason).
The good news right now is that there is a very effective process for removing these reviews on most sites. These review sites have every incentive to keep their feeds free of fakes. Their business and consumer audiences both care about this. In most cases, the sites want to help you remove reviews that are truly fake.
At the same time, you’re right to treat this with urgency. You shouldn’t let a fake review against your business stand. The damage that it can do is quite serious. First, if you leave it up for too long, visitors are more likely to believe it. If it sits for months without a response or action, you’ll look like you just don’t want to face it.
Take a few minutes or even an hour to relax, and proceed to respond once you’re calm. Then, start with the non-confrontational plan that’s most likely to succeed.
Step 2: Request Removal From Review Platforms
Removing the review before anyone can see it is the ideal scenario. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to get a false review taken down that fast. It’s your word against the reviewer’s, and it may take time for more evidence that it’s fake to show up.
Review sites can’t take down every post that a business owner doesn’t like. However, depending on the site, you may be able to request that the review be assessed. Here’s how a few of the major review sites deal with these situations…
Facebook will only remove reviews if they don’t comply with Facebook’s Community Standards, a general set of guidelines that prohibit things like sexual harassment, bullying and threats.
Be sure to review Facebook’s community feedback standards for the most recent policies covering fake reviews. Note that these guidelines govern all of Facebook, so they’re not specific to businesses.
- Find the review in question.
- Click the V-shaped icon in the top right corner of the review.
- Click on “Report Post” and follow the instructions.
Yelp
Yelp will remove a review only if the reviewer has a clear conflict of interest, doesn’t focus on their own consumer experience, or includes offensive language or private information in the post. You can directly report a review and request it be removed if it violates Yelp’s Content Guidelines.
- Log in to your business’s Yelp account.
- Find the review in question.
- Click on the flag icon in the bottom right of the review.
- Select the reason you’re reporting the post, and write out your explanation. Note that Yelp will remove a post due to conflict of interest only if the site moderators are convinced the reviewer was biased, and if you don’t have any evidence of that, the review will probably stay up.
Google will remove posts if they’re written by someone with a conflict of interest or by someone who’s impersonating someone else. You can make a report here, but again, an independent moderator will decide whether there’s enough evidence that the review is false.
- Search for your business on Google Maps.
- Click on the business’s overall star rating. This should take you to a list of reviews.
- Use the mouse to hover over the review you want removed.
- Click on the flag icon that appears.
- Follow the prompts. Note that you can’t write out an explanation of why the post should be removed; you can only request that a particular post be reviewed by Google.
Step 3: Craft a Calm, Public Response
If customers see you respond to one negative post, but not to others, they might assume that the other negative posts are accurate, and that’s why you’re not responding. However, if you receive many online reviews, it’s time-consuming to respond to every one you feel is wrong.
Weigh your options before you decide to write back to a false post. If you decide to speak up, draft a polite response addressing the post’s points. Don’t accuse the reviewer of anything or use insults.
Regardless of how you respond, we recommend always leaving the door open for the possibility that the review is not fake and inviting the reviewer to contact you to resolve the issue. This makes it apparent that you actually care about your real customers. Here are a few tactics you can use:
- Consider that the reviewer may have posted a review for the wrong company: “We appreciate when our customers take time to review us, but it seems that may have the wrong company as we don’t have any record of you ever having visited us. Maybe you have us confused with another company? If it was definitely us, then we’d love the opportunity to make things right.”
- Emphasize your commitment to customer service: “I’m very sorry to hear that you were treated poorly by our staff. We try our best to treat every customer with the utmost respect, but sometimes we don’t meet our own standards. If you would take the time to contact me, I’m sure we can resolve this issue.”
- Politely draw a question to false claims: “I think there’s some confusion here, as you wrote that we closed early on Sunday so you couldn’t get in, but we aren’t open on Sundays. Maybe it was another day (or a different business)? If you wouldn’t mind calling us so we can understand the issue a little more, then I’m sure we can figure out what happened.”
Step 4: Strengthen Your Reputation with Positive Reviews
One false review looks bad when it’s your business’s only review. However, when you have 100 glowing reviews, that one nasty one looks questionable. In fact, when you consistently get more reviews on a steady basis, that one negative review effectively gets pushed to the wayside. Use an automated system like ReputationStacker to do the heavy lifting for you.
All you have to do is enter a customer’s phone number or email address into the system, and ReputationStacker contacts them with a one-question survey to get their feedback, then directs them to the review site of your choice so they can post reviews.
Hit Your Review Goals with ReputationStacker Today!
One angry customer or jealous competitor doesn’t have the power to hurt your business, provided you know how to respond to false reviews online. If you can’t get the review removed, responding in a positive way can show other customers just how professional you are.
Meanwhile, drown out the rare fake review by attracting a steady stream of positive reviews using an automated system like ReputationStacker.
