Let me begin by saying that I think Angie’s List is a great service and that I am a member.

There are many directories and review sites that have been manipulated by business owners or third parties on behalf of those owners. I thought that the Angie’s List model appeared to have remedied this review spam and fraud for the most part.

Until I discovered this:

I reviewed a service company about a year ago or so. They were absolutely deplorable and attempted to flat out lie in order to sell me on more expensive items and services I did not need. I will not go into the details as to how I am certain of this but trust me, they were very shady and were big believers in the bait-and-switch.

I proceeded to post a negative review on Angie’s List and included great detail so as to share the tactics with the rest of the Angie’s List community.

Forward to 2 days ago, Monday the 11th. I deliberately waited a few days to see if I got a response back from Angie’s List after complaining but no such luck. Here is what I received:

Sweet loophole for any shady company with negative reviews huh?

What if I had deleted my Angie’s List account? What if I had missed the email? What if I did not spend the time to respond to the email?

Reviews have become an extraordinarily important element of not only search engine algorithms but user behavior in online research. If the one company that requires you to actually pay for the service gets rid of their negative reviews then I don’t know who to trust.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.