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Understanding Review Guidelines

The majority of the top local business listing platforms also feature consumer reviews. Your listings on these sites won’t be complete or competitive without a solid plan for earning and responding to reviews, but each platform has their own guidelines for acceptable practices when managing reviews. Violating those guidelines can lead to penalization by the platform, so if you’re going to respond to customer reviews of your business, it pays to have a working understanding of the guidelines for each platform where those reviews are posted.

The Purpose of Review Guidelines

Review guidelines exist for two key reasons:

  1. To defend the platform from untrustworthy or low-quality content.
    If a platform doesn’t have the trust of its users, they won’t be as likely to use the information presented to them. That translates to fewer visitors to whatever portion of the platform’s site is monetized, leading to a loss of revenue. And ultimately, if consumers don’t trust the reviews they encounter on a given platform, that platform may be in trouble as a viable business. Review guidelines allow the platform to control the quality and content of reviews posted to their site.

  2. To defend consumers from untrustworthy or fraudulent content.
    Platforms need to make sure that their data is honest and accurate. For example, if a platform knowingly allowed businesses to review themselves without requiring them to disclose their identity, this would not only represent a conflict of interest (because the company would be biased towards rating itself favorably), but it would also represent a violation of FTC guidelines, potentially opening the door to legal prosecution. Setting guidelines and making sure to enforce them helps platforms make sure that consumers never encounter a review that’s anything less than honest and forthright.

For local businesses, knowing the guidelines for each platform on which you’re managing reviews is not only an ethical necessity, but a legal one. Failure to comply with a platform’s business review guidelines can have real-world consequences. In 2017, a car dealership was fined $3.6 million for publishing fake reviews and engaging in other deceptive practices. Failure to adhere to a platform’s guidelines can also lead to reputation disasters like being publicly shamed by a platform like Yelp for breaking their rules. The benefits of violating a platform’s review guidelines are hardly worth the risks!

Review Spam is Real

Despite the risk of severe consequences, review spam has taken on global dimensions, with brands paying agencies to have workers around the world post positive reviews of their business or negatively review competitors. The threat of negative reviews can also be used as a form of blackmail, and false negative reviews are a frequent outcome of specific circumstances, like an employee being fired and seeking retribution or a staffer having personal conflicts with their employer.

Unfortunately, some of the most visible review platforms, like Google My Business, have struggled to address the reality of review spam and keep those spammy reviews from accumulating. Loosely enforced guidelines only further encourage spammers in their harmful practices. If your business falls victim to review spam, read Fighting Review Spam: The Complete Guide for the Local Enterprise for detailed instructions for defending your company in every way possible.

Being Smart About Review Guidelines

As a local business owner, your obligation is to abide by fair business practices that protect consumers and protect your company. To be sure you don’t accidentally wind up spamming a given platform, your first step is to read and become familiar with its business review guidelines. Details really matter here. For example, Yelp doesn’t permit businesses to ask customers for a review, but Google is fine with that practice. Similarly, Yelp doesn’t permit former employees to write reviews of the business, but Google’s guidelines don’t prohibit someone who no longer works for the business in question from submitting a review.

This list will take you to the business review policies of the major review platforms. Give these guidelines a once-over to protect yourself from business review mishaps:

If you’re managing reviews on an industry-specific review platform (like TripAdvisor for hotels, or FindLaw for attorneys), this list will help you quickly locate its policy.

Risk-Free Review Management

While no business can completely rule out the possibility that it will be targeted by a review spammer at some point, there are simple steps businesses can take to avoid ever being labeled as spammers themselves. Regardless of the platform:

  • Never offer payments or any other incentives in exchange for reviews.

  • Never ask your employees to review your company or review it yourself.

  • Never negatively review your competitors or have any other employee do so.

  • Never hire any agency that offers to generate reviews for you from non-customers.

  • Never post reviews on behalf of customers — they must always be created directly by the customer in their own account on a given platform, with the exception of testimonials on your own website, which you may post on a customer’s behalf with their permission.

By following these basic best practices you’ll be avoiding the most obvious pitfalls, but do take the time to read the guidelines for each individual platform where you’re managing business reviews. In the end, a small investment of your time can protect your business from a costly mistake.

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