Contractors say bogus damaging Google critiques a large hit to their small business
Nicholas Waldram of EaveSafe Gutter Protection and Jackson Mayers of Gutter Guys Plus each say that starting a handful of weeks ago, adverse reviews began to appear on their enterprise pages at the rate of about 1 a day.
Both contractors say they instantly compared the names of the posters to their client list and determined that the evaluations weren't written by actual shoppers. In some circumstances, they posted replies stating such.
Mayers said he was notified right after getting a 1-star review on Google's five-star scale back in February. But it wasn't just the low rating that was a dilemma, it was also the written overview. Mayers was suspicious proper away mainly because at the time 1 of the damaging reviews appeared, daytime temperatures have been nevertheless effectively below freezing. He commonly doesn't set up gutters in winter simply because the caulking applied to waterproof seams usually won't seal effectively.
But it wasn't just Gutter Guys. Mayers began to examine notes with his pal and competitor Nicholas Waldram of EaveSafe Gutter Protection.
Waldram had also been dealing with suspicious one particular-star reviews posted by accounts with names that didn't match his client database. He reached out to the posters for clarification, but didn't get any response back.
He said he had a five-star Google rating prior to the recent string of 1-star evaluations but the negatives pushed that down significantly.
“These new reviews have dropped us down to a 4.4 star rating,” he said. “It takes an emotional toll. Everyone here requires a lot of pride in what we do.”
While there are some similarities in the comments, both contractors mentioned the account profiles used in the 1-star critiques weren't identical.
Some of the accounts were new, other individuals had many critiques of unique businesses from months or years before. One particular account utilized a photo lifted from the Facebook page of what appears to be a higher school student.