Research suggests that having a customer review site will increase websales. It stands to reason that this would be the case. Like the guys at Church of the Customer I know that whenever I am about to make a purchase plugging into Google “[product name]” “review” is the best way to go to figure out whether you are about to purchase a dog or lemon.

Caution has to be taken though. If I had listened to a lot of the chattering I would never have purchased my Dell notebook (I made my purchasing decision just after Dell’s machines started spontaneously combusting) My notebook is now twelve months old and my fingers are singe free.

In addition, it is worthwhile considering that not all review sites are what they appear to be. SurveySoftwareReviews.com has been indentified by MarketResearchTech.com as a sham review site.

After doing a little research they identified the following reasons why they considered SurveySoftwareReviews.com to be a sham review site:

1) Prezza Checkbox is the only survey software system to receive an absolutely unblemished review

2) The editor of SurveySoftwareReviews.com, Troy Martin, doesn’t appear to be a real person.

3) SurveySoftwareReviews.com has all of the qualities of a fake web site.

3.5) Every link on SurveySoftwareReviews.com points to Prezza Technologies landing pages:

4) SurveySoftwareReviews.com is published by an SEO consultant who claims to have Prezza Technologies as a client.

5) Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury is also Ray Smith, who also writes survey software review articles about how to use web content to drive traffic and it includes a link to SurveySoftwareReviews.com

The evidence would indicate that SurveySoftwareReviews.com is a sham review site and it’s existance is just a low level SEO tactic to drive business to Checkbox. The conclusion then is to watch the reviews you are reading. My advice would be to stick to the more legitimate review sites. The ones I would recommend are Cnet and Amazon and the like.