Google Tests Out New Label to Legitimize Reviews

Google’s addition of reviews on its SERP was meant to help businesses establish an online presence for themselves, but in many ways this attempt has gone awry. Many businesses have complained about users mixing them up with other businesses that have a similar name, and some have also suffered review bombing wherein users leave bad reviews because they dislike the owner or due to some other irrelevant concerns that shouldn’t be a part of their reviewing process.

It seems that Google is now trying to fix this by adding a label that marks reviews as unverified because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up helping users contextualize them properly. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that this label can be seen above the average rating that the business has been given based on what users have said.

Clicking on this label will reveal text that says that these reviews are not verified, although Google does add that it attempts to remove fake reviews whenever it notices them. This might help businesses to avoid incurring a loss due to unfair or unreasonable bad reviews, although it also represents a step back for Google since it is an admission that their review feature did not pan out the way they were hoping it would.

Some are wondering what the point of this feature is if Google is openly admitting that they are unverified and therefore not all that useful for the average consumer. We might see Google doing away with this feature entirely, since most businesses are not all that happy with it being there given the lack of control they have over it. This might be a bit of a blow for Google considering it needs to compete with Facebook’s review feature which has become an important part of most business’s marketing strategies when they first open up.

However, Facebook’s reviews aren’t entirely reliable either, so this might just be Google’s way of being transparent to rise above its competitors in some way.

H/T: Robin Dirksen

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World