Matt McGee from SmallBusinessSEM.com blogged about a bad case of negative review spam experienced by a florist in the SF Bay Area.
He had contacted me for a referral for a florist to deliver flowers to one of his friends and I stumbled onto their 10 negative reviews all in a 2 day period. I told Matt to ignore the reviews because I had had good experiences with the company over the years.
I called the shop and helped them report the abuse and suggested they claim their listing immediately. They were actually a target of the affiliate hijackers but some good Samaritan reverted their listing a day after it was grabbed (per the edit logs). They were truly lucky in that case.
But they're not so lucky with all the black hat reviews. Hopefully, Matt's post will get some G Maps team attention and their reputation can be recovered.
Kinda hard to believe they didn't jump on this issue long ago, but they just weren't aware.
He had contacted me for a referral for a florist to deliver flowers to one of his friends and I stumbled onto their 10 negative reviews all in a 2 day period. I told Matt to ignore the reviews because I had had good experiences with the company over the years.
I called the shop and helped them report the abuse and suggested they claim their listing immediately. They were actually a target of the affiliate hijackers but some good Samaritan reverted their listing a day after it was grabbed (per the edit logs). They were truly lucky in that case.
But they're not so lucky with all the black hat reviews. Hopefully, Matt's post will get some G Maps team attention and their reputation can be recovered.
Kinda hard to believe they didn't jump on this issue long ago, but they just weren't aware.
