Google Maps Review Manipulation • blog.network-sec

Attackers can easily exploit online reviews to destroy credibility and trust. Let’s use our knowledge and apply it to a common problem: Weaponized Fake Reviews.

Review Manipulation

Google Reviews (actually it’s Google Maps Reviews) are easy prey. With nothing more than an afternoon and 3 mobile numbers (for speed and convenience), an attacker can destroy a victim’s credibility and business.

We’ve witnessed this firsthand back when we worked with SEO customers. As we didn’t offer fake reviews or even positive “counter-reviews” for honest clients, we were as helpless as the victims themselves. It often seemed like competing businesses were behind the attacks - but anonymity is on the attacker’s side. Reviews are a known weak point for businesses of all sizes, small regional business to multinational companies.

There’s not much else to explain here, you know how it works. But now that we got our feet wet, why not dip a little bit deeper?

Fake Google Reviews - Evil Plus

Let’s take the role of the attacker first. You’re experienced in Blackhat SEO and you take your time.

First, make sure the victim gets mostly very good, 5-Star reviews and nothing else. The victim may at some point pick up on your positive streak and add it’s own fake 5-Star reviews. When the target is super happy, has 30 positive, only 5-Star reviews, you will slowly start to turn things.

Delivering now only 1-Star, very bad reviews will make them stand out quickly.

The contrast will make the (partly real) 5-Stars look like the fake ones. On the victim’s Google Review Page, it will start to look, as if the bad reviews are for real and the good one’s are bought to make up for the bad.

To give it second kick: Since you - the attacker - made lots of the 5-Stars, you control them. You can change those older review comments at any time, so they sound like written by bots or badly translated:

“Good service! Recommend much for coming friend.”

Victims rarely suspect good reviews, which lets you stay in control till the last moment, on top giving you an option to change the past as well.

Counter Strategies

Using our expert advice you can easilty protect your business from such attacks. Following, we will shift the perspective back and take our role as Business Owner, who’s trying to defend against Weaponized Fake Reviews.

Hardening: Balanced Review Profile

A balanced profile with a mix of 1 to 5-Star reviews is much harder to exploit. A few new 1-Stars won’t stand out in a natural-looking mix. Control the narrative by intentionally adding mild, self-critical reviews that don’t hurt much, like:

“Service could be faster.”
“Quality is good but we can’t afford this very often TBH.”

Use the same tactics to defend against bot-like comments.

You could intentionally add some not-so-perfect language and spelling throughout all 1 to 5 Star comments, as counter for the second kick mentioned before. Think about it, which 1-Star is worse, the one you control or the one an attacker controls?

Why not give yourself 1-2 Stars, where the comments sound real, but not that negative at all. Or focus on rather unimportant points of your service. Customers won’t shy away from a healthy mix, as long as the balance is clearly trending towards the positive side.

Organic Growth - Avoid Common Pitfalls

Inexperienced “SEO Experts” will often try to sell 3rd-party plattform reviews as counter strategy.

We cannot recommend that for several reasons. First of all, it will make the contrast look even stronger, more fake. When you (as a victim) add other plattforms into the mix, you need to do it using the same counter strategy as before. Make sure, the growth looks organic and is spread randomly time-wise. Think in phases also, a business may start out weaker, then try to improve, reviews could follow this “natural” pattern, in terms of content as well, e.g.:

“Hey I wanted to say, I wasn’t satisfied at all on my first visit, but they really took my critique seriously and wow… this is amazing now, I’m really happy!”

Don’t overdo it though: Pay most attention now to keep things in balance and don’t care at all about single, maybe untrue or mean comments.

Secondly, and we’ll explain this below in more details, more plattforms mean also more complexity and cost. Things will get harder and harder to manage.

Other Platforms - Powerful but dangerous

Other review platforms like Yelp, Trustpilot, or industry-specific sites may require small tweaks to the approaches above, but can generally be handled with similar tactics.

We already shared a word of warning: Each new plattform will increase not only your attack surface, offer new vulnerable spots, they also can tip your entire presentation over onto the wrong side, adding unwanted, artificially looking contrast, while they will require a lot more resources to operate. Every plattform you don’t know inside-out will add the risk of unknown factors you may not have forseen, for example stricter defenses against fake accounts or content moderation.

Ignore Bad Reviews

Finally we cannot recommend the good, old reply to every bad comment tactic. Don’t, it looks terrible. Just ignore it, decorate and curate your review plattform to resemble a friendly and open looking culture with space for feedback, improvements, critique and good service.

A textblock reply, copy-pasted to every bad comment looks defensive. We recommend to reply where you feel, you can actually, truly improve your service or product and provide a better experience for the unhappy customer. Maintain a positive and balanced tone. Let single bad reviews fade into the background naturally. This mix ensures you don’t overreact to bad reviews. Focus on presenting a long-term, openly-looking profile.

Bonus Tipp: How to get more Reviews?

For the first time in this article we actually are talking about real reviews, made by your real customers. A cheap, easy and tested strategy is to lay out flyers or pin a sheet to your info-board:

“Please rate us. We’re happy about your honest feedback.”

If you fear too much negative or even unfair reviews, you may add a line like:

“Should you be unsatisfied with your experience, please give us the chance to understand and improve your issue by talking to one of our review support agents first.”

Final Wisdom of the Days before XMas: Janus Cycles

Everything, the good, the bad and the ugly, runs in phases. Patterns, repeating. We can measure them. Then we may predict them.

Can we change them?

The biggest mistake would be, to get overly confident in, what actually causes them.