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A harassment campaign on Goodreads

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270 points ilamont | 3 comments | 06 Jan 20 20:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.573s | source
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wyldfire ◴[06 Jan 20 21:06 UTC] No.21973326[source]▶
> Not all of these fake reviews are one stars – some give five star or other highly rated ratings. The catch with these highly rated reviews is many of them are created to give the false appearance that they were written by Tomlinson to raise his own Goodreads ratings, spoofing his name and photo and sometimes even using his own copyrighted writings.

Wow, that's devious. I wonder if any of the fake product reviews I've seen are obvious fake endorsements placed there by the competition.

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1. TazeTSchnitzel ◴[06 Jan 20 23:43 UTC] No.21974868[source]▶
I have heard (but don't have personal experience of etc) that there is a similar tactic for “negative SEO”. Often people try to spam links to their own site to boost PageRank, leading to Google etc picking up on this and ranking websites worse for it, leading to people spamming links to competitors' sites so Google will penalise them.
replies(2): >>21975236 #>>21978723 #
2. yellow_lead ◴[07 Jan 20 00:22 UTC] No.21975236[source]▶
This is a thing and it can be combatted by "disavowing" links through Google webmaster tools somehow, I believe.

Of course that doesn't work for other search engines though.

3. oneeyedpigeon ◴[07 Jan 20 10:37 UTC] No.21978723[source]▶
Wouldn’t that problem disappear if google just ignored spam links rather than penalising them?