TrustPilot doesn't like HTML links to review pages

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11 points·blackdogie··3 comments

I know this isn’t anything new, but TrustPilot is just a scam.

If you don’t pay there is no validation over people posting reviews even posting to the right page (we got bad reviews for a similarly named online store). And they don’t let you link to the page.

If you do pay, it’s effectively a percentage of revenue, they take you for all they can get. They then let you link, check reviews before they are published, discard ones that don’t meet your requirements, and also provide (paid) tools to encourage reviews from customers who you know will have had a better experience.

It’s such a bare faced scam, and shocking that they have the audacity to do it.

On top of that there are all the typical content issues with online reviews, people only using 1 and 5 stars, people venting for things outside the company’s control, and so on.

Dare I say it… TrustPilot should just be ad supported. Scrap all the scam bits, invest in independent content moderation, and advertise on review pages. I think the incentives would be better aligned.

It comes across as extortion. "Pay us money or we'll put up a sign saying you're a bad person for...doing exactly what the Inernet designed for." Surely this will kill their SEO as well.

I suspect one could try a defamation case against this. I believe it has been tested in court that linking to a website is freely allowed, and doing so does not therefore constitute misuse of the target site. It would therefore seem to me that claiming that a business you have no existing business relationship with is breaching your terms and conditions for doing something within their legal right, is pretty dodgy behaviour.

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