Reviews online cannot always be trusted and that is why we have some brilliant sites like Top Consumer Reviews out there which try to cut through the fake reviews and give honest appraisals of businesses for the consumer. The unfortunate thing about reviews is that whilst they can be brilliant in terms of offering you an insight of the user experience, they are also easily manipulated by businesses which mean that they can get glowing reviews which just aren’t true. You can never guarantee to avoid this of course but there are some tips which you can use to help find out whether the review you are reading is real or not.

Me, Myself and I

Cornell university did a study which found that when people are lying they will start to overuse personal pronouns such as me, I and myself. This is done to prove credibility that they were in fact in the business, when they really weren’t. This if course is only a rule of thumb but if you do find reviews which are pronoun heavy, you may want to tread with caution.

Names and Photos

Most people who regularly leave reviews are likely to have made their profile a bit personal with a photograph and they are also far more likely to have a more exciting name than John Smith. Now of course it is entirely possible that there is a John Smith out there leaving reviews who does not wish to show a photo of himself, but in reality those chances are very low, so best to err on the side of caution.

Spikes

If there is a sudden spike in positive reviews it will be down to one of two things, the first is that the company or business have recognized that something needs to be done and therefore upped their game, the second is that they have attacked the problem with money and therefore many fake reviews have been left. If the situation is the former you will see things like people being surprised that despite previous reviews, they were very impressed. If however the latter is true, it is likely that they will be reviews without much detail which simply give the place a thumbs up. If you see this, avoid the business or product.

Content Farms

If a business has paid for reviews to be left then it is likely that these reviews will have been written out by people in what they call a content farm, usually based in some far flung corner of the globe. This is why you can often see errors in the reviews and we don’t just mean spelling mistakes. You can tell whether or not the person has English as their first language so if you see someone called Fiona Johnson writing in broken English with strange characters, you will be right to tread with caution.

You may very well ignore some genuine reviews because you think that they are fake but that is better than trusting a fake one.