Reading a tea review is easy, right? Not necessarily. Tea reviews cannot necessarily be trusted to offer good advice, and for two reasons: people have different tastes in tea, and Electronics, Home aplliences etc review reviewers are not necessarily honest in writing tea reviews. When reading a tea review, you would do well to ask yourself two questions: can I trust that this review is honest? And, does this person have similar taste in tea?
Look for affiliate links in order to identify fraudulent and dishonest reviews:
Affiliate links are links to a website, which track sales and give a kickback, commission, or percentage of each sale to the person who owns the website sending the traffic. The web abounds with people trying to make a fast buck through affiliate programs. Affiliate programs are particularly common on tea-related websites. Many people will post favorable reviews of a tea on a website or blog, and embed an affiliate link in the review or following the review, in the hope that they will earn money when people purchase the tea after clicking on the link.
While there is nothing wrong with affiliate programs, the inclusion of affiliate links in a tea review should make you cautious, as these programs introduce an incentive for people to be biased or dishonest in their reviews. In general, when people are being honest in reviews, they will also be honest about the fact that their reviews contain affiliate links. If affiliate links are not openly identified, it is more likely that the review is fraudulent or biased.
Look for hidden relationships to tea companies:
The mere absence of affiliate links does not guarantee that reviews are honest. I created an interactive website for tea ratings and reviews, and the site already has a problem with people connected to tea companies creating fake accounts to give high ratings to their company’s teas. Some review websites take greater efforts to identify and screen fraudulent reviews than others. There are also a number of tea blogs across the internet that are closely tied to tea companies. While some of these blogs openly identify their relationships (i.e. the official company blog, the personal blog of an owner, or the blog of an employee or family member of an owner or employee), these relationships are not always openly identified. Unscrupulous companies often use blogs both to promote their products by writing favorable reviews, and in an attempt to increase the search engine rank of their website by adding more links to their company website.
When reading a tea review on a blog that you are unfamiliar with, glance over the whole blog to get a sense of whether the blog is written by a serious tea drinker, or if the blog exists primarily to promote a particular company and their teas. Is this blog recommended by, and networked in with other tea bloggers? Fraudulent blogs usually have a hard time gaining respect and establishing a following.
Be cautious of tea reviews on company websites:
Some tea companies allow customers to review teas on the official company website. Although many of these companies are honest, it is often not possible to verify whether or not any fraudulent ratings have been added, or whether the company has filtered out negative or unfavorable reviews, or edited any of the reviews. It is best to not trust reviews hosted on a tea company’s website for this reason, unless you have reason to believe the tea company is trustworthy.
