Beware of Fake Review Sites
Affiliate programs are intended to help promote products by allowing others to earn commissions on sales. Affiliate programs have become very popular for all types of products. TeraByte even offers an affiliate program managed by 2Checkout, MyCommerce or BMTMicro to allow resellers, consultants and others to earn commissions without having the hassles of traditional agreements and reseller pricing.
Unfortunately, this modal has created a new market of black-hat marketers setting up sites with fake reviews 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.
The reviews are typically made up using the products documentation, marketing materials, and screen shots. They tend to 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. They also don’t typically disclose their conflict of interest as required by the FTC.
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.
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.