Thursday 5 September 2013

Scam Free Corner

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99952103@N05/9664756290/
Scam Free Corner

garrickdunstan posted a photo:



Scam Free Corner



A review site is a website on which reviews can be posted about people, businesses, products, or services. These sites may use Web 2.0 techniques to gather reviews from site users or may employ professional writers to author reviews on the topic of concern for the site. Early review sites included Epinions.com [1] and Amazon.com.



Review sites are generally supported by advertising. Some business review sites may also allow businesses to pay for enhanced listings, which do not affect the reviews and ratings. Product review sites may be supported by providing affiliate links to the websites that sell the reviewed items.



With the growing popularity of affiliate programs on the Internet, a new sort of review site has emerged - the affiliate product review site. This type of site is usually professionally designed and written to maximize conversions, and is used by e-commerce marketers. It's often based on a blog platform like Wordpress, has a privacy and contact page to help with SEO, and has commenting and interactivity turned off. It will also have an e-mail gathering device in the form of an opt-in, or drop-down list to help the aspiring e-commerce business person build an e-mail list to market to.



Because of the specialized marketing thrust of this type of website, the reviews are not objective.



Aside from sites that enable users to post reviews of products and services, there are also those that work on a "professional" or "expert" basis. Some of these sites commission, and pay for, named individuals or bodies with expertise in a particular field to provide their review material, while others hire in-house editorial staff to perform these reviews. By endeavoring to maintain independence and objectivity and allowing their writers' credentials and site ethos to be scrutinised, such sites avoid many of the above-mentioned criticisms aimed at user-review sites.



For example, the UK consumer advocacy organization, the Consumers' Association, offers Which?, a site that carries no advertising but covers all manner of products and services, with reviews and ratings often based on exhaustive independent testing. Another type of review site does not provide free-form text reviews, but instead evaluates a particular class of products, services, or businesses using a set of pre-defined criteria. One such example is the Canadian shopping site Wishabi, which reviews merchants on 42 criteria [9] and displays the results in a series of icons. This second type of professional review site tends to provide a better platform for comparative analysis, but at the expense of reduced flexibility and richness. scamx.org/

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