Remove company website from trustpilot - legal advice

[Yellowberry]

Hi, Trustpilot is like it is, has tons of fake comments, especially in our industry. We decided not compete with these fakes, and quit - yet, trustpilot dosn't remove company name/domain. Every time we want to update it, to something like "profile unactive" they change it back to our company name. We don't have bad score, 3.2-3.4 depending how many negatives we'll report, but we just don't want to maintain profile there, as it just collect negatives we need to deal with, we don't want to ask our customers for positive reviews neither, but they are on high search positions both in google and bing. They just gives us extra job, and we never allowed them to use our company name / domain.

I know some companies managed to not be evaluated there, does anybody know legal way to do so? They ignore our requests for profile removal

 

[fisicx]

You can't. Even if you removed it completely I could still write a review of your company and a new profile would be created.

 

[Ozzy]

I'm afraid you can't. We've had the same issue with UKBF's TrustPilot rating.
We've even got spammers who sign up on here to post threads promoting illegal content who we've blocked/banned and they have then gone onto TrustPilot and posted negative reviews - and TrustPilot will not remove those reviews. This experience for us has shown me how irrelevant TrustPilot is in providing a trustworthy and accurate appraisal of any business, being blunt they are endorsing illegal content by allowing complaints from people being blocked from promoting such content.

 

[DontAsk]

AS a customer I found TrustPilot to be quite tenacious. I had to jump through hoops to prove a recent (1 star) review was genuine, otherwise they threatened to remove it.

The company under review then offered me future discount in return for giving them an extra star, LOL. Needless to say that went in the bin.

 

[Fagin2021]

I'm afraid you can't. We've had the same issue with UKBF's TrustPilot rating.
We've even got spammers who sign up on here to post threads promoting illegal content who we've blocked/banned and they have then gone onto TrustPilot and posted negative reviews - and TrustPilot will not remove those reviews. This experience for us has shown me how irrelevant TrustPilot is in providing a trustworthy and accurate appraisal of any business, being blunt they are endorsing illegal content by allowing complaints from people being blocked from promoting such content.

Hear hear ! The only chance you've got is if the negative review is actually defamatory eg "This company is a bunch of crooks" as opposed to "This company is acting like a bunch of crooks".

 

[japancool]

This is possibly why Trustpilot only scores 4.3 on Trustpilot.

 

[antropy]

I know some companies managed to not be evaluated there, does anybody know legal way to do so? They ignore our requests for profile removal

You could just ignore it and forget about it and focus on building good reviews on Google/Facebook?

Paul.

 

[Paul Carmen]

The whole business model is designed to get you to claim a listing, crucially you have to accept their T&Cs to do this, meaning you've accepted their rules about use of your reviews/your brand, their brand/their logos etc. This then moves you towards having a paid account to manage reviews properly.

I suspect you'd have a hell of a legal fight to get your company removed completely, as it would undermine their whole business model. There have been/potentially are various law suits going on. There are numerous posts on here highlighting similar frustrations and one company did try to fight this and documented their experience: https://medium.com/@ryanbadger/how-trustpilot-extorts-businesses-91ca4b6a6f62

I'd suggest you don't engage with them, but look to rank your business for your own real customer reviews. Do this by getting review scores into your Google Business listing and organic search results.

To get an honest and trustworthy review profile there are more cost effective methods than Trustpilot. PM me if you'd like to discuss this, as we offer a full service solution, or we'd be happy to point you in the right direction if you want to do this yourself.

 

[Yellowberry]

Hello, Google reviews is not solution for us. We'd not like to anyone be collecting reviews about us. It's not due to we are afraid of the score, which as I told, it's acceptable on Trustpilot. On-line reviews is something fake in total, and I see our nearest competition is buying reviews. We don't want to compete with something false, and from other side - we'd like to focus on maintaining our business, not discussion with frustrates.

What I did, and maybe this will help someone - try to collect reviews on your own website, and try to disavow in search console incoming links from sites like trustpilot.

We are still looking for legal solution against them.

 

[AlanJ1]

We are still looking for legal solution against them.

I would advise you spend no energy on this, It's been done before and Trust Pilot are allowed to collect reviews for you, even without you wanting them collected.

 

[fisicx]

We are still looking for legal solution against them.

There isn't one. You can't stop a complete stranger writing a review about your company.

 

[Paul Carmen]

Hello, Google reviews is not solution for us. We'd not like to anyone be collecting reviews about us. It's not due to we are afraid of the score, which as I told, it's acceptable on Trustpilot. On-line reviews is something fake in total, and I see our nearest competition is buying reviews. We don't want to compete with something false, and from other side - we'd like to focus on maintaining our business, not discussion with frustrates.

What I did, and maybe this will help someone - try to collect reviews on your own website, and try to disavow in search console incoming links from sites like trustpilot.

You're right in that reviews online can be faked. But unfortunately you don't operate in a vacuum. If you don't have reviews on the main platforms your customers look on, or you allow a competitor to post fake reviews for you or them, then you have problem.

Google has well over 80% of the online searches and Trustpilot is the biggest player in UK reviews. Even if you succeeded in removing your business from Trustpilot, the only way to stop Google reviews is to not have a Google Business listing, this puts you at a significant disadvantage for local and branded searches. Especially if your competitors have great reviews on their profiles.

If customers are influenced by this in your industry, and all the research and data suggests they are in almost all markets, then the only way to win this battle is to proactively manage your own reviews. You can do without Trustpilot and build reviews on other independent platforms, plus show them all on your website, but unless you don't rely on internet searches, doing without Google is a different matter.

Disavowing inbound links from Trustpilot does nothing to stop them ranking for reviews about your brand, in fact all it does is weaken your inbound link profile and hurt your rankings. Unfortunately, you cant swim against the tide here, Google make the rules for how search works, and if your competitors are gaming the system you need to come up with a legitimate process that works better.

It sounds like you're trying to do this, but simply adding them to your own site wont cut it unless you rank way better then all your competitions. Even then, unless you are using an independent 3rd party review platform to generate reviews, you can't markup and show reviews in your organic search results.