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by Exmoor 2215 days ago
In general, the in-depth review sites that I tend to go to for reviews seem to be fairly trustworthy. One thing working in their favor, is that they tend to review many similar products and could collect referral commissions on most or all of the products they review, so there is reduced incentive to give a positive review of a bad product.

There are, however, two types of sites benefiting from referrals that I have a complete lack of trust in. The first is tech news sites (Gizmodo, for example) that feature posts about sales on specific items. Sometimes these are actually good deals on good products, but often a little research indicates that the price and/or the product are nothing special and they're just trying to drum up referral bucks. Often times these sites still post actual reviews worthy of reading, but I definitely will not depend solely on that one review.

The category of sites that I wish I could just erase from the internet is the SEO blogs that seem to exist for just about anything these days. Often times these purport to be review sites, but a little digging reveals they're likely just people regurgitating information from manufacturers and making recommendations for products they've never actually used. For popular product categories, I often have to sort through pages of search results to find a page that's not just some low-effort SEO blog. I shudder to think about how many consumers may be misled by these sites and make poor choices because of them.

2 comments

A close relative of the low-effort SEO blog is the low-effort YouTube review. I'm not speaking of the dude unboxing something in their kitchen, but the videos that just feature screenshots from the product's website while somebody just reads the features from the same website. Thankfully these are typically pretty transparently useless, but I do wish they would disappear altogether.
I too share your logic behind placing more trust in sites that go in-depth and review across all the brands, as opposed to focusing extra attention in only one or a couple.

Regarding SEO blogs, I have seen a lot of "review rewrite" jobs posted on a freelancing site, indicating there is a market for this kind of devaluing behavior (worse than not adding value, this actually is a net-negative on society, where costs are externalized)