Google Local Service Ads Seeing A Lot Of Fake Reviews

Jul 25, 2022 - 7:51 am 3 by
Filed Under Google Maps

Google Fraud

Google's Local Service Ads are supposed to be screened, guaranteed, and reviewed by someone contracted by Google. But supposedly, the reviews in many Local Service Ads are filled with fake reviews.

As we covered earlier today, Google is now showing three local services ads on mobile, instead of two. Part of that tweet from Len was that he said "all of these listings are spam & Google has refused to take action on my reports for 5+ months." Len said to expect much more spam and fake reviews to hit the Local Service Ads.

Greg Sterling posted on Twitter asking "Fake reviews are making it into LSAs. Does the presence of the "Google Screened" label (in those instances) constitute "consumer deception" (under FTC) because it might imply the integrity of reviews in LSAs?"

Curtis Boyd joked that buying fake Local Service Ads reviews are way more expensive than normal fake reviews:

And Tom Waddington points out something way too obvious:

Clearly, this is gaining the attention of the local SEO community and Google will have to act but by the time Google acts, will Local Service Ads be untrusted?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Google's statement on this LSA spam issue:

 

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