The following is an excerpt taken from an article by Linda Fox, deputy
editor for TNOOZ.
Since I write reviews for many things, places, and travel related gear,
this was important to me. If you travel and read reviews about hotels…this will
be important to you.
For years TripAdvisor has kept how it vets its
reviews a closely guarded secret, prompting calls for verified reviews and
column inches from the media on supposed mistreated hotels.
Now, the review giant is shedding a little more light on how it keeps
the boosters, vandals and optimizers at bay.
The company feels strongly about the verified reviews route and says it
believes its scale of the reviews is what maintains its content integrity and
that verified reviews are still open to manipulation.
The process it takes follows a general pattern – review is submitted and
goes through an automated process with about 50 filters for integrity and
moderation issues.
It then falls into one of three paths:
·
no issues are identified and it is published.
·
definite issues are identified and it is rejected
e.g. for profanity – the system scores words and gets more accurate at removing
inappropriate reviews.
·
issues are highlighted and the review needs closer
scrutiny by an analyst to determine whether it meets guidelines. It is then
published or rejected.
TripAdvisor says it has a bank of 300 content specialists, many of who
have backgrounds in law enforcement, credit card fraud and even forensic
computing.
Business owners also have a role to play and can report a potential
blackmail situation, for example upgrade or bad review. TripAdvisor senior vice
president, global product, Adam Medros, says 80% of the time no review materializes.
He adds that of the 139 reviews the company receives every minute, the
percentage that is problematic or fraudulent is in the “low, low single
digits.”
He argues that the gain is not worth the risk and the threat of
penalties alone is enough to put most people off.
That said the three most common problems are boosting, vandals and
optimization companies and this is where the process gets interesting.
In March 2014, TripAdvisor received a review about a hotel from the
property’s own IP address. Straight away an email was sent to the reviewer for
verification, the user did not respond and the review was not published.
Later, in July, a second review was submitted on the hotel from the same
reviewer and hotel IP address and again, an email was sent to verify. This time
the reviewer responded.
The TripAdvisor team then put his/her name into publicly used systems
such as Facebook to reveal that it was a member of staff.
Next comes vandalism whereby properties seek to increase their own
ranking by lowering that of the competition around them.
Finally, there are optimization companies out there which promise to
write reviews for a price, say $500 for 10 reviews and TripAdvisor responds in
a number of ways when dealing with these companies.
·
It can examine the reviews submitted for a
particular property and identify other clients being written for.
·
Where it spots review writing jobs being advertised
it applies for them enabling it to write some reviews, identify the property
and from the sort of text required, uncover other properties
·
It can act as an optimization firm itself
Medros points out that with when it catches a property working with
optimization firm and starts to take down reviews, the property’s ranking slips
down.
“More effort and focus should be put around the optimization firms.
There are regulations but little enforcement. We don’t mind being held to a
standard but others have to be equally pursued.”
One recent example resulted in 150 properties being penalised for
working with a single optimization company.
But, why has TripAdvisor decided to open up all of a sudden?
According to Medros there as been internal debate for some and one
reason is to simply give the content integrity team credit for its work.
A further reason is to do with the discussions happening around content
law and who owns the copyright on review content and therefore has the power to
take it down
“We can’t talk about the right to write without all the safeguards we
put in place.”
Taken from TNOOZ article written by Linda Fox, deputy
editor.
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