FTC, Google or both?

Zack Urlocker posted an article on “The Open Source” about one of the scams that the internet marketing technologies have spawned.  He writes about the practice of setting up large numbers of review sites that publish product reviews, invariably very positive, full of links to the reviewed product.

The reviewers make money because they receive affiliate revenues from the vendors of the products they promote.  In some cases they make enough to be able to pay for Google Adwords to promote their reviews and so increase traffic and thus grow revenues further.  On a site like http://payperpost.com/ this concept of sponsored conversations is openly advertised.

So what is wrong with this practice?

It is that many of these reviews never disclose that are paid by the vendor for their reviews.  The reader is duped into thinking that an objective third party had a good experience and therefore wrote the review.  In some cases the reviewers post their reviews on many sites, each with slightly different names, words and graphs, so they can create the impression that the product is widely used and liked.

Perhaps even more wrong and more important to the vendor is the fact that the links from the reviews to his product pages grow the page rank of these pages, so he will get a better position on search results and thus more search traffic and increased sales.  An honest competitor may get very frustrated seeing his valuable content get crowded out by these bogus reviews.

So should this be stopped and if so by who?

The FTC has announced its intention to play a role when it introduced “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising”, which went into effect December 1^st (you’ll find the full text here if you have the stomach to read its 84 pages).  Unfortunately, these guidelines are deeply flawed, as Jeff Jarvis describes better than I could.  It is as hard to regulate what people say on the Internet as it is what they say in face-to-face speech, the Internet is not the Medium it is the Place where they communicate. The owner of a coffee shop cannot control what two people say to each other over a cup of joe.  The response to the FTC on this front has been very unanimous: stay out!

Google cannot control the content of web sites either, but it does have the ability to score pages lower if they detect fake review sites.  This is not easy, as there are many uses of affiliate linking that are ethical and legitimate.  But if Google gets it right most of the time, then the value of these links goes down, the page ranks are normalized and the financial incentive for the scammers goes away.  It would work like a spam filter, but for web pages.

I also think that the people who search for product information will grow wiser over time.  If one reads a glowing review about something, it makes sense to check the rest of the site on which it is published to see if the authoritative.  Same for the reviewer, what other reviews did he write?  When the public gets wise, the scam dies (it has been a long time since I received email from my cousins in Nigeria that want to transfer millions to my bank account).