Suspending Affiliates with Fake Review Sites
TeraByte Unlimited is offering an affiliate program managed through 2Checkout, MyCommerce or BMTMicro. The affiliate program is intended to allow resellers, consultants, and others, to earn commissions on sales of our software without us having to deal with special reseller pricing and agreements.
Unfortunately, we’re finding that black-hat marketers are setting up sites with fake reviews. These reviews are meant to steer you to higher commission products. These types of fake review sites typically have a rating or endorsement system which is based on whatever is going to make them the most money. They don’t typically disclose their conflict of interest as required by the FTC.
The reviews are typically made up based on the documentation, marketing materials, and screen shots. They use generic, unfounded, and sometimes libelous statements meant to persuade you to move towards the higher ranked products. There are typically no actual benchmarks, testing methodologies, results, and the like. The worst part is that because these types of sites are so successful, they are flooding the Internet search engine results, some even showing up as the first result.
To top it all off, some of the product makers are also involved in black-hat marketing activities including, but not limited to, extremely high commissions, posing as or paying for users on forums, paying for reviews, claiming to be award winning based on awards given to everyone by download sites, and so on. This makes it very difficult for users to get accurate and truthful information on products through Internet searches or discussion forums.
TeraByte doesn’t condone any type of black-hat activity and will not be raising our commissions (or prices) to get a higher ranking on fake review sites. Instead, we will be suspending any affiliates we find engaging in such activity. Unfortunately this process isn’t instantaneous and we may be opening ourselves up to negative fake reviews, but it’s the right thing to do.
In the end, the best way for users to figure out what is best for them is to try it. Even honest reviewers have their own tastes, biases, ignorance, and limitations in reviewing . That’s why we continue to support the try-before-you-buy method of marketing our products. All our software trials install and uninstall cleanly without adding junk to the system.
We hope that you found this article insightful and will share the information about fake review sites with your friends.