Electronics reviews = spam

Google, Spam November 19th, 2008

Google’s search results for product reviews truly suck hard, particularly in the electronics vertical. To be fair, so do Yahoo’s.

Recently I’ve bought a laptop, a new PC (custom built), and a new TV, and like many customers I like to read impartial expert reviews of products before I buy them. For cheaper products I don’t mind using the customer reviews on places like Amazon, but when I’m spending upwards of £100, I usually like to get an expert’s opinion.

For a long time now this has been all but impossible to do, because both Google & Yahoo’s search results have been flooded with crap from sites such as reviewcentre.com. Often these results are simply holding pages “awaiting” a review - an example of this is shown below:

These pages rank because they’re on domains with a high level of authority, and there is often some unique content such as a price comparison feature - of little value to a user looking for reviews.

Then there are the retailers/affiliates who target the keyword [reviews] in order to benefit from the (likely highly converting) search traffic in this area. Often there are no reviews on these sites either.

Increasingly it seems that the only way to get legitimate reviews is to type in the model #, and then some random feature of the product or some superlative such as ‘good’, ‘great’, ’superb’, etc.

Will someone please build a site that aggregates only expert reviews of a range of products? Please? :)

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