Back to All NewsFake Ratings Put Good Doctors at Great Risk
Posted By American Med Spa Association, Thursday, October 29, 2015
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By Eva Sheie, Director of Online Strategy, RealPatientRatings
Unless you were under a rock, you saw this week's story about Amazon taking legal action against over 1,000 individuals who wrote fake reviews on their site.
This bad behavior is not limited to reviews of products on Amazon. Right now in aesthetic medicine, a handful of website and SEO companies are including fake ratings on doctors’ websites right now, putting their clients at risk, damaging their reputations, and opening themselves up to punitive action by Google or worse.
How do you know if your ratings are fake?
If you have a star rating on your website, and try to click on any part of the ratings, it will typically not be linked to a source where you can read reviews, and there is no supporting documentation to represent the rating or explain how it was calculated. The number does not increase with new reviews and can be plainly seen in the code.
The number of total ratings shown when faked is typically very large - often claiming to have 400+ total ratings. We have rarely seen a plastic surgeon with a rating quantity this high from any legitimate source, other than RealPatientRatings members who have been participating by surveying every patient without exception for several years.
How are they doing this?
By including a schema tags for aggregate rating and review count, typically in the footer on every page. It is often placed unobtrusively alongside social media items.
Five reasons why faking your ratings is too risky
1. Breaking trust with consumers: Nothing makes a potential patient angrier more than being lied to. If someone clicks through to your website expecting to see reviews or ratings because they’re present in your Google search results, and then discover there’s nothing really there, they will not trust you. They will move on to a practice who meets their needs for safety, and this begins online.
2. Signaling distrust to Google: Google rewards the most trusted sites with higher rankings. Google hates anything fake. Over the years we have seen this pattern over and over: fake keywords, fake article sites, fake press releases, fake links, and so on. Successful SEO means behaving like a big brand, which results in higher rankings, so why would you take a risk like including fake ratings on your site? A big brand would never do this and wouldn’t dream of it. Google has the smartest engineers in the known universe writing algorithms to punish low quality content and fake backlinks — so why would you think fake ratings or would not be equally or even more hated by Google?
Google has the smartest engineers in the known universe writing algorithms to punish low quality content and fake backlinks — so why would you think fake ratings or would not be equally or even more hated by Google?
3. Ethics: Is it ethical to misrepresent your ratings to get patients to come to your website? Imagine your website being reviewed by your society’s ethics committee… how would that go? Do you also understand and accept that having fake ratings is sending a negative message to every colleague in your market that you're willing to cheat?
4. FTC's Truth in Advertising Guidelines: Would the FTC agree with you having phony ratings? Since 2010, they have had a division solely devoted to cracking down on deceptive internet advertising.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Truth In Advertising rules provide some useful guidelines: reviews must be “truthful and substantiated,” non-deceptive, and any material connection between the reviewer and the business being reviewed must be disclosed.
Reviews must be “truthful and substantiated,” [and] non-deceptive...
5. Fraud: While talking with our members in person at the ASPS meeting in Boston, a surgeon from Scottsdale with several hundred legitimate ratings recently showed me how two other surgeons in his market were displaying phony ratings. He suggested to me that misrepresenting one’s rating could be construed as fraud and result in civil action if the patient believed the statistics and was wronged somehow.
While the legality may be questionable, it is terribly unfair to your colleagues and awfully unprofessional to put up a fake rating when others have collected their ratings ethically and without excluding any patients.
Interestingly, the day after the surgeon showed me the fakes, Google seemed to have fixed the problem. It is clear that Google is looking at these bad actors already and working toward eliminating the fraudulent ones.
I expect the fake ratings trend to continue, and that we’ll see a future algorithm update address it. I also expect those websites with fakes to be “dinged” or punished by Google. If you have a fraudulent rating on your website, we recommend taking it down immediately. If you weren’t aware it was there, you may also rethink your relationship with your web company.
If you have a fraudulent rating on your website, we recommend taking it down immediately. If you weren’t aware it was there, you may also rethink your relationship with your web company.
Fix it now before the damage is done
If this is happening to you, whether you're aware of it or not, it is still your responsibility to manage and monitor the behavior of the website companies or SEO professionals managing your presence.
My suspicion is that if most the doctors knew what they were risking by having fake ratings on their websites and understood how damaging it was to the patient relationship, they would be very unhappy about it.
In the meantime, we'll keep fighting the good fight and educating doctors the best we can.
RealPatientRatings patent-pending process results in more 100% verified reviews faster than any other platform, returns them to you to power your own website and marketing efforts, and delivers actionable intelligence to find hidden revenue make unbiased practice decisions.
More about RealPatientRatings
Unless you were under a rock, you saw this week's story about Amazon taking legal action against over 1,000 individuals who wrote fake reviews on their site.
This bad behavior is not limited to reviews of products on Amazon. Right now in aesthetic medicine, a handful of website and SEO companies are including fake ratings on doctors’ websites right now, putting their clients at risk, damaging their reputations, and opening themselves up to punitive action by Google or worse.
How do you know if your ratings are fake?
If you have a star rating on your website, and try to click on any part of the ratings, it will typically not be linked to a source where you can read reviews, and there is no supporting documentation to represent the rating or explain how it was calculated. The number does not increase with new reviews and can be plainly seen in the code.
The number of total ratings shown when faked is typically very large - often claiming to have 400+ total ratings. We have rarely seen a plastic surgeon with a rating quantity this high from any legitimate source, other than RealPatientRatings members who have been participating by surveying every patient without exception for several years.
How are they doing this?
By including a schema tags for aggregate rating and review count, typically in the footer on every page. It is often placed unobtrusively alongside social media items.
Five reasons why faking your ratings is too risky
1. Breaking trust with consumers: Nothing makes a potential patient angrier more than being lied to. If someone clicks through to your website expecting to see reviews or ratings because they’re present in your Google search results, and then discover there’s nothing really there, they will not trust you. They will move on to a practice who meets their needs for safety, and this begins online.
2. Signaling distrust to Google: Google rewards the most trusted sites with higher rankings. Google hates anything fake. Over the years we have seen this pattern over and over: fake keywords, fake article sites, fake press releases, fake links, and so on. Successful SEO means behaving like a big brand, which results in higher rankings, so why would you take a risk like including fake ratings on your site? A big brand would never do this and wouldn’t dream of it. Google has the smartest engineers in the known universe writing algorithms to punish low quality content and fake backlinks — so why would you think fake ratings or would not be equally or even more hated by Google?
Google has the smartest engineers in the known universe writing algorithms to punish low quality content and fake backlinks — so why would you think fake ratings or would not be equally or even more hated by Google?
3. Ethics: Is it ethical to misrepresent your ratings to get patients to come to your website? Imagine your website being reviewed by your society’s ethics committee… how would that go? Do you also understand and accept that having fake ratings is sending a negative message to every colleague in your market that you're willing to cheat?
4. FTC's Truth in Advertising Guidelines: Would the FTC agree with you having phony ratings? Since 2010, they have had a division solely devoted to cracking down on deceptive internet advertising.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Truth In Advertising rules provide some useful guidelines: reviews must be “truthful and substantiated,” non-deceptive, and any material connection between the reviewer and the business being reviewed must be disclosed.
Reviews must be “truthful and substantiated,” [and] non-deceptive...
5. Fraud: While talking with our members in person at the ASPS meeting in Boston, a surgeon from Scottsdale with several hundred legitimate ratings recently showed me how two other surgeons in his market were displaying phony ratings. He suggested to me that misrepresenting one’s rating could be construed as fraud and result in civil action if the patient believed the statistics and was wronged somehow.
While the legality may be questionable, it is terribly unfair to your colleagues and awfully unprofessional to put up a fake rating when others have collected their ratings ethically and without excluding any patients.
Interestingly, the day after the surgeon showed me the fakes, Google seemed to have fixed the problem. It is clear that Google is looking at these bad actors already and working toward eliminating the fraudulent ones.
I expect the fake ratings trend to continue, and that we’ll see a future algorithm update address it. I also expect those websites with fakes to be “dinged” or punished by Google. If you have a fraudulent rating on your website, we recommend taking it down immediately. If you weren’t aware it was there, you may also rethink your relationship with your web company.
If you have a fraudulent rating on your website, we recommend taking it down immediately. If you weren’t aware it was there, you may also rethink your relationship with your web company.
Fix it now before the damage is done
If this is happening to you, whether you're aware of it or not, it is still your responsibility to manage and monitor the behavior of the website companies or SEO professionals managing your presence.
My suspicion is that if most the doctors knew what they were risking by having fake ratings on their websites and understood how damaging it was to the patient relationship, they would be very unhappy about it.
In the meantime, we'll keep fighting the good fight and educating doctors the best we can.
RealPatientRatings patent-pending process results in more 100% verified reviews faster than any other platform, returns them to you to power your own website and marketing efforts, and delivers actionable intelligence to find hidden revenue make unbiased practice decisions.
More about RealPatientRatings
