Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome.

Speaker 1: 0:27

Back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, hosting as usual, and today I've got what I suppose is a bit of a cautionary tale about online dirty tricks. So what some of you may not know and I've not really spoken about it much on the podcast is that in the past, I used to do quite a lot of stuff with Amazon, so particularly with Amazon FBA, so Fulfilled by Amazon, and creating products and selling them on Amazon. I used to sell quite a bit of stuff on Amazon all around Europe. Now, the story about why I'm no longer doing that at the moment is a bit of a long one, which I might do in another podcast, but just let's say for now the main reason is Brexit. So when the UK left the European Union, I was selling lots of stuff around Europe and they were all low value items, and the new regulations that came in when the UK left the European Union meant that we didn't have access to the single market in such an easy and simple way as previously, so I essentially stopped that business because it became unprofitable to sell those products.

Speaker 1: 1:32

However, for many years, we successfully sold lots and lots of stuff, and I was involved in a mastermind group where there was five of us who were all selling on Amazon, where there was five of us who were all selling on Amazon, and we used to share tips, sort of discuss problems with each other and help build our knowledge, experience and businesses together. And we started this mastermind back in I think it was 2014, so about 10 years ago. Now we all still stay really closely in touch with each other. Um, we're less formally as a mastermind nowadays, more just on whatsapp, and we occasionally meet up or have calls with each other if we've got a specific issue I want to talk about, and we talk about more way more than just amazon nowadays. Now, however, one of the members in the group he still sells on Amazon. He actually has started selling again on Amazon because he previously sold his Amazon business to one of the Amazon aggregators back maybe three years ago, three and a half, four years ago. When there's that big surge of companies buying up Amazon sellers and Amazon FBA businesses and trying to roll them all into one, he sold his main business back then and since his no-compete has conspired and he's now back to selling on Amazon again.

Speaker 1: 2:54

Now I'm not going to tell you exactly what his product is, because it's not my business or my information to share, but I can tell you that it's a luxury product, so quite expensive. We're talking $50, 50, 60 dollars, which, for the object it is is, you know the product is quite expensive. Um, now he's been having problems with this product. Um, he sells it in. So the background is he sells it in the uk and he also sells it in the USA, and in the UK the product's been selling fine. He's been getting good reviews, having no real issues with it.

Speaker 1: 3:31

But he's been having real issues the past probably eight months or more in the USA. He's been getting lots of problems with the products in terms of quality issues and it breaking or not working right and lots of sort of negative reviews and he's been tearing his hair out trying to work out why his product is having so many issues in the US, hitting on in the UK and it's got to the point where he was even wondering if it was whether it was being shipped from where it's manufactured in China, whether it was being shipped by air or by sea, was causing problems and air pressure differences, temperature differences, all those kinds of things to try and work out why he was having issues with his products. And he's been talking to the rest of us in the mastermind you know this group about these and sort of sharing information with us. And more recently he's been sharing a lot directly with me because he just knows me and he thinks I'm quite a logical thinker um, because we've discussed many problems over the past and discussed lots of different things. And he says, yeah, you're quite logical about. I just want your logical brain to look at this. And we spent a bit of time together and looked over the data and looked at all the different reviews.

Speaker 1: 4:53

And more recently I sort of noticed a pattern that was coming into these reviews. He was having reviews saying I purchased this product over a month ago and it has now developed this problem. But then, if you looked at the order that the review was linked to on Amazon, it was ordered three days before the review was left and there were several others like this where these reviews were mentioning timelines which were impossible due to when the product was ordered, and so this raised a big red flag and it was like that isn't a genuine review. Someone here is trying to leave you negative reviews. So the question here is so why would someone be wanting to leave negative reviews against a competitor's product?

Speaker 1: 5:41

Obviously, there's two potential reasons. One is they're just trying to put people off buying them from reading the reviews. But let's think about it. You know only so many reviews get given and you know it's a tricky thing to do just to put people off in that respect. But Amazon is also a search engine to put people off in that respect. But amazon is also a search engine and, unlike google, where we know that links are essentially votes and the more links you have and the quality of those links is sort of powers the ecosystem of rankings in amazon they don't look at links, but they do look at customer reviews is one of their key metrics, not the only metric, but it's one of the key metrics and there's two reasons here. One is, obviously, if you start getting negative reviews, you can actually, if you get a certain percentage, amazon can take your product offline for a while. If you get negative reviews, it reduces your overall star rating, which can affect how you appear in the search rankings there. And also, yeah, eventually after a while, people will stop buying products with low reviews, so there's a kind of that effect that it has on on people trying to choose a product.

Speaker 1: 6:50

Now, obviously, if you've got a terrible product when you're getting genuine negative reviews and that works really well, you know, negative, genuine negative reviews should bury bad products that are genuinely bad. But clearly in this case and in probably plenty of other cases, there are certain people out there who, rather than playing the system fair and relying on building a good product of their own and getting good reviews of their own, would actually rather go out there and perform negative actions against competitors to try and bury competitors. So these dirty tricks. And, yeah, it's clear here that we've discovered that there is a competitor of my friend's product in the US who is trying to kill his product by leaving these negative reviews, and this has obviously clearly been going on for quite a while because, as I say, the product in the uk, the exact same product, exactly manufactured, all the same, it's been getting really good reviews, very rarely getting a negative review. Doing really well. So clearly, whoever this competitor is, probably isn't in the uk market, isn't attacking them there, but in the us, the same product getting attacked and attacked and attacked and attacked. It's still getting some genuine good reviews from genuine customers.

Speaker 1: 8:05

But on the Amazon platform the kind of rule of thumb is that it takes five good reviews to overpower one negative review and it's easy that these people are clearly paying people to buy the product and then leave negative reviews. But what they've done is they've got sloppy and that's how they've been found out now. The reason they got sloppy is we started looking at those reviews that were coming through that clearly were, you know, time sensitive and we're saying, you know, I've had this product for over a month, or I bought it at christmas or I bought it for a certain time which didn't tally up with those order numbers, and we just started looking to see, right, I wonder if this competitor is attacking other people with the same product type, other competitors. So we started looking at other competitors and then we started to see these exact same review texts were appearing against other competitors and we thought, aha, that's, that's unusual. You don't normally get that the exact same text. Um, and then, digging into it a little bit, we thought maybe these other uh competitors were also being attacked.

Speaker 1: 9:12

Now, when someone leaves a review on amazon, you can also. You can click their name and see if they've got any other reviews that they've left, and all the people that were reviewing my friend's product this was the only review they'd ever made so there's clearly new accounts that signed up, bought the product and left their first ever review, which was a negative one for this product, whereas when the same review text was being used against other competitors, going back in some cases, a couple of years before these going back, they seem to be from people who were reviewing lots of products and they look genuine. So it appears that what this person who's doing these negative attacks is doing is looking for genuine negative reviews of a similar product and lifting that text and then putting it into the text of a negative review for my friend's product. Now, the reason I do this is because Amazon has some quite advanced AI that knocks out reviews that it thinks are malicious. So clearly, these people are lifting review texts that have obviously passed the AI previously and are putting it against my friend's product.

Speaker 1: 10:17

So what's the moral of this story? Well, the moral of the story is that whatever you do online, however good you are, however decent you play, you've got to watch out for people performing negative tactics against you. People will leave bad reviews maliciously. People will try and leave bad links. Google says they deal with negative link attacks and maybe in many cases they do, but the fact is people will try it.

Speaker 1: 10:46

I don't want to worry you, but I just wanted to raise a flag to say if you ever see something like this, if you ever start to get negative reviews, if you ever start to see negativity against you, that isn't necessarily fair it is worth digging in to see if this is genuine, because if it is genuine, you obviously you've got a problem you need to sort out. If you've got a product that's bad or you're doing something that is not up to scratch and you're seeing these things, you need to sort it out. Okay, fair enough, but sometimes it might just be people acting negatively towards you, so what can you do I mean in this case of my friend, he's going to terrorism. He's building a case to say, look, I'm under a negative attack here, can you sort this problem out for me? And hopefully he'll escalate to the right place to get that sorted out.

Speaker 1: 11:29

So well, yeah, that's my cautionary tale for today, that although 99% of people out there are decent, honest and hard-working and will play fair, there's one percent that won't, and this is in all spheres of business. And just watch out. You know, when your head pokes above the parapet, you'll find you start to become a target. Don't despair. Most of the time the negative tricks won't work, and if it does work, you'll start to be able to figure it out. At the end of the day, if you're being targeted, it means you're doing a good thing, because they don't target people who aren't a threat. So it means you're threatening these people, which means you're doing a good job. So, yes, if you're doing a good job, just keep an eye out that this might happen to you or something very similar. Anyway, until next time and take care, and I'll see you later.

Speaker 1: 12:15

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that, if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at keywords people use that. You can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have you. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

Speaker 1: 12:50

Thanks for being a listener. I really it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywords people usecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywords people usecom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link. Download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.