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It is not hard and can be done a lot cheaper than $2000. All you really need are a few relatives, friends, or peers to start an AL membership and write a bogus review.
Here is a question for you to consider. How many good reviews on any list would it take for you to decide to use the persons service? Is it 1, 3, 10, 20? As you can see in a post above one person is willing to try a contractor with 4 or 5 recent good reviews. But where those reviews by family, friends, etc., helping the contractor to game the system? Another poster above used an inspector that had a handful of "raving" reviews and found them to be bad.
Good points, but not terribly convincing. Simply showing how it would be possible to unfairly skew the ratings does not prove that the ratings are unfairly skewed. Sure, of course, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to come up with the scenarios which you did. But what evidence do you have that your suppositions are anything more than that?
I'm by nature an extremely skeptical individual and I read reviews, regardless of provider, with an eyebrow raised and an alertness to any sort of phoniness. It might be because I live in a small city, but when I've used AL to find various contractors, I've come up with dozens of companies, with many of them having fifty, sixty, or a hundred or more reviews. If the number of reviews drops to below ten, then I don't even bother looking, as a sample size that small would be easy to skew.
Reading through a large chunk of any prospective company's reviews, as any intelligent person would, you can get a feel for their legitimacy. Different writing styles, different grading standards, different types of complaints and compliments; I've yet to find a group of reviews on AL that seem staged. Certainly there are some that were done for less than honest reasons, but when the numbers are as large as they are, your accusation of widespread manipulative review conspiracies doesn't IMHO hold much water.
It's helpful to compare a site like AL to one like Yelp. I know from firsthand experience, and have read of many other's similar experiences, that Yelp will contact businesses and subtly suggest that purchasing advertising (or whatever it is they want) can make bad reviews get buried. There was even a lawsuit or two about this, stemming from some calls Yelp made to small businesses that amounted to something like "Pay us some money or else..."
As long as I don't have any negative reviews I can advertise all I want and I don't even have to have any reviews to advertise. I also asked what happens if I do receive negative review? I was told as long as I can provide sufficient information to refute it I can still advertise. It is all about the money!
Do you think it would be better if businesses were not allowed to refute bad reviews?
And nearly all websites have advertising. Having ads does not mean the site's principals have been compromised.
...Yelp will contact businesses and subtly suggest that purchasing advertising (or whatever it is they want) can make bad reviews get buried.
I've tried to leave bad reviews for certain establishments on YELP and they werent accepted. Once I left a good review that was accepted, after which I changed it to a bad review. it was deleted almost immediately.
^ Yep, I've too seen enough proof to make up my mind that Yelp manipulates ratings.
But I have not seen anywhere in this thread or in my time on the site any evidence that AL does the same. Many of the "skeptics" in here imply that showing that something could be true is the same thing as proving that it is true.
The reviews really mean nothing, but it is at least as good a method as poking your finger on the prettiest ad in the phone book or choosing a contractor who had a last name similar to your first girlfriend's. The key is to get references and actually contact them. Ask for references in your area and if the customer will allow go and look at the work that was done. The best reference is one where the contractor made a mistake and corrected it quickly and at no cost with no fighting. That is the contractor that you want. Ask for an example of this. If they say there are none, go elsewhere. The contractor who believes that he never makes any mistakes is the last one that you want. They all make mistakes, onr pretty much every significant project. A huge number of them will never admot making a mistake. They will have a thousand excuses or reasons why their mistake was your fault.
They can use friends or family as references, but if you talk/question them a bit you can often tell if they are making up the story.
It depends upon where you live. I joined for awhile, but there were no local contractors on her list near me...they were all for the nearest city 40 miles away.
If I ran Angie's list, I would let people recommend service people without having to pay the membership. I could see no point in paying for just having the priviledge of giving others my recommendations.
Do not believe everything on Angie's List. I found a roofing company through Angie's List and was very disappointed with that company. It failed to stand behind its guarantee and made feeble excuses why it shouldn't. It did not want to pay for any of the damages for a failed roof it put on.
Angie's List went out of its way to promote this particular roofing contractor and even had him on TV.
Last edited by Southside Shrek; 09-01-2011 at 04:59 AM..
Reason: add
^ Yep, I've too seen enough proof to make up my mind that Yelp manipulates ratings.
But I have not seen anywhere in this thread or in my time on the site any evidence that AL does the same. Many of the "skeptics" in here imply that showing that something could be true is the same thing as proving that it is true.
Very interesting how you expect all to believe you because you "have seen enough proof". All you provide here is nothing more than opinion and yet you condemn others?
As for showing how something can be true, and that it is very easy to do, is just as good as expecting it is true when it comes to a corrupt business advertising on a poorly controlled site.
But then nobody knows more than JohnHenrtSDM and nobody should believe anyone but JohnHenrySDM! Isn't that so?
Being a small business owner, I can say that from my own research that Angies List, the BBB, and Yelp are the last places I would attempt to advertise. I honestly don't know anyone that uses AL or Yelp, and the BBB lost credibility years ago. Another one that I avoid like the plague is Service Magic. They charge you for leads, then send job leads to a dozen contractors at once. Turns into a race to dial the number, and half the time the leads are bogus to begin with.
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