Im not sure what to do…I have no idea who’s doing it. Im being spammed with negative reviews from people ive never done business with saying crazy things. Saying I infected them with covid, and told them “woman shouldn’t go to school.” Just crazy things that have no bearing on reality. These are mainly being left on thumbtack, and some on google. I’ve had to shutdown my thumbtack account because its gotten so bad. Thumbtack has taken most of them down but more keep popping up. Im not even sure how they’re doing it if my page is not visible. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Must be the competition in your area. That’s some next level stuff.
That’s what I’m thinking. I can’t believe someone has the balls to do that.
I’d be hiring an IT person to do some sleuthing.
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look up astroturfing. In one man’s opinion it has now morphed into just pure attacks.
Amazon has done it (when they didn’t want unions forming in their warehouses), politicians do it, outside forces do it, it is the new way of doing bot business.
If you find out who did it to you, you can always do it to them as well. Bots are for hire all over the place.
Then again, it could just be some kid/indians/russians/chinese who will follow up with a scam to get you to pay to have it stop. The online world is fascinating.
I would love to figure out who it is, but Id never do it back. I don’t want my reputation tarnished for something I actually did do lol. I talked to a few people in the IT industry and they told me there’s really no sure fire way of knowing who did because of the way thumbtack has things setup.
You have an angry baby momma?
Stop using thumbtack
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I know it can drag your rating down, but every negative review (legit or not) is an opportunity to write a nicely worded, professional response. Remember, when they’re nutjobs, you aren’t writing to the reviewer (whether they’re a real person/client or not), but you’re writing to the person who may find them and read it. If every bad review is an obvious hoax, it just may serve to bury that 1 legit bad one, lol.
Also, stats say a 5.0 rating sells worse than one slightly lower. They reckon if it’s too high people figure that it was faked. I believe the optimal # was between 4.6 & 4.8, depending on the study. Maybe I need to recruit folks to help us drop our #… 
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Sure feels like I do lol
I did. I was hurting for work when I started using it but I’ve decided this is the last straw.
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I only have a small handful of reviews. If they were legitimate criticisms I’d let it go, but the things they were saying were very reputation tarnishing. If I was a consumer and saw the things on my page that were being said I would stay far far away.
All you can do is attack it professionally. We’ve had some before, and the response is something like: “We’re very sorry, but given (whatever info they gave, name/whatever), we’re not able to locate/match you with any client that we’ve ever provided service to. Perhaps you have accidentally reviewed the wrong business? If you indeed used Wolverine Clean on your home, please give us a call at xxx-xxxx as soon as possible so that we can find a resolution. That is not up to our standards/not something we would condone/etc.”
Essentially, “it sounds like this is a load of crap, but we’re always going to make things right”. That is the message anyone who reads it will come away with. Use it as an unfortunate opportunity to show your professionalism, and always take the high road. Of course, get bogus ones removed where you can. If someone is really trying to harm your business, a good enough reply will make them take it down because it backfired on them.
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Thank you, Ill definitely take that into account when Im responding. Before I got them removed I just said “I have never said any such thing, nor have I ever done business with you. Please stop harassing my business page with fake reviews.”
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Sounds like a good response. We had one bad review on Angie’s List, basically replied we hadn’t ever done work for them. Ironically he called us two years later and asked to get the windows done like nothing ever happened.
By the way ANGI can take a hike. We were #1 with 320 A reviews and they told us we are a “relic from the past”.
Weren’t paying them enough to keep yor account up I guess, lol. I think those sites essentially extort you the more reviews you have, bc they know you’re more invested and leaving them will hurt you more. We quit dealing with them, Yelp, HA all a long time ago. They call all the time.
Yes, they do.
And they leave messages feigning to be an interested customer so that you call back. Happened to me yesterday. I was not happy.
That’s exactly what happened.
We were just doing the $90 for targeted advertising in a couple areas, we got suckered into a $3500/yr PW advert and while we did make that money back in jobs, it didn’t pan out so tried to opt out. They said our previous way was no longer an option and wanted $250/mo JUST to keep our reviews intact, calling us “relics from the old company”.
We told them to cancel everything, done. 10 years of work, gone in a flash.
Should have just copied them and made a review page on your website and put them all there.
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We’ll look into that. I did copy everything before they cancelled us.
