Be wary of certain review styles
Here are some ideas to help you spot fake reviews: Non-factual/Overly factual reviews Facts are important in a review. Staying factual can protect you from a lawsuit. However, factual tips are also more useful for everyone. If you see a string of reviews that are heavy on the adjectives (“Amazing!” “Fantastic!” “Life-changing!”) and light on facts, skip them. You’re looking for reviews that tell you what specific features the reviewer found that make it a good, or bad, product. In fact, it often saves time to skip 5-star reviews and look at the 4-star and 1-star reviews to see what negatives people mention. Again, however, any negatives need to be backed up with facts. “It was terrible” tells you a lot less than, “It worked fine for 3 weeks and then the power button fell off.” On the other end of the spectrum, you might find reviews that have too many facts with no conclusions. It might just be a list of product features with no information about how the product impacted the reviewer. That’s a sign the reviewer is just copying the features list and doesn’t actually own the product. There will be times when researching a product you’ll notice a similarity in reviews across several websites. In one case recently discovered, nearly every review for a product was posted on the same day. That’s certainly a red flag, and the fact that none of the reviews were very factual was just the icing. For another item, every positive review found online was the same exact review. The author’s name was even the same on every site. That’s not a coincidence, that’s just plain lazy on some marketer’s part. New reviewers Watch out for product reviews from new accounts or new websites. True, the person might have created the account just to buy that product, but some of the reviews should be from long-time members of the site. You might find the person has reviewed hundreds of widely dissimilar products, which gives them a bit more credibility than someone who’s only reviewed a few items from the same manufacturer. It helps, too, if some of those reviews have factual criticisms. Few reviews The only thing worse than tons of suspicious reviews is, very few reviews. You’re left with no way to make comparisons. At that point, every review becomes suspicious, especially if they only appear in out-of-the-way blogs and websites. For example, there might be a “too-good-to-be-true” tech product for sale that doesn’t have a review, or even a mention, on any reputable tech site. Or you might have to go to page 10 of Google’s search results to even find a review of the product you’re after. In those cases, give it a miss. You’re better off buying a competitor that has more reviews, or just not buying that type of product entirely. This cool site also helps in weeding out fake reviews.
