You Can't Delete Bad Reviews - Bury Bad Reviews

You Can’t Delete Bad Reviews – Online Review Websites Make Money With Them.

Imagine marching into Home Depot or The Apple Store or your local grocery store demanding they eliminate a product or series of products from their inventory. That’s what you’re doing when you ask/threaten/demand a website to delete bad reviews about your business.

This is a suitable analogy because online review websites monetize all of their content through advertising or sales of advertising and related services. Online review websites took a page out of Facebook’s playbook in the sense that the people who use the platform are the products. All of the content all of these people give the review websites is free inventory they make money with in two obvious ways.

Advertising Revenue from Online Reviews

Review platforms slap ads up and down and around all of the reviews they publish – good or bad, real or fake. Why would they want to delete bad reviews or any reviews? The more reviews they display the more money they make on advertising.

See for yourself.

The screen shot immediately above is the perfect segue to the other major revenue stream of many review platforms…

Selling Reputation Management Services

In my opinion Sitejabber sales people must struggle to keep a straight face selling business review services. That’s because at least one of them is designed to eliminate fake negative reviews forever. It’s the verified purchase service which eliminates any chance of a business getting bombed with fake negative reviews. At the time, we looked at their $399 monthly service which included this feature and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t tempting. Collectively all of their services have broad appeal at first until you do the math and realize you’re paying thousands of dollars every year to combat a bullshit problem while gaming the online review system yourself. Cost of doing business? I call bullshit.

Speaking of bullshit you have to watch this Yelp documentary then decide for yourself.

It’s a fool’s errand to try to delete bad reviews. What you can do is turn the tables and fix bad reviews on your own terms. At the end of the day you’ll end up saving lots and lots of money while achieving a durable and beneficial result.