sitejabber.com: A Biased Review Site

On this website, I show you how sitejabber systematically and secretly suppresses critical reviews unwanted by the reviewed website.

The review site sitejabber.com ought to provide an independent and unbiased view on online businesses. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

By investigating internet dating scam, I also looked at reviews on sitejabber.com and wrote critical reviews on sitejabber.com myself. This way I found out how sitejabber covers up fraud.

Have you ever thought about why ratings on the review site sitejabber.com are so high? Myself, I feel most motivated to write a review after I have gotten really disappointed by a service or purchaise. In cases when everything goes well, we usually think little about writing a review. Therefore critical reviews should be overrepresented on a review site. However, at sitejabber, we see just the opposite. If you open sitejabber.com just five-star reviews show up:

sitejabber is a commercial company. sitejabber earns money through cooperations with business websites which benefit from positive reviews on sitejabber. Obviously, this makes sitejabber biased. Critical reviews with low ratings just interfere with sitejabber’s business model. And this is where the bias starts. If you read sitejabber’s slogan carefully to the end, the last word reveals what they care about:

I wondered why at sitejabber I could not find critical reviews about websites with obviously shady businesses practices. I put my own critical reviews on sitejabber and thought others could read my reviews. When I told others, to look for my critical reviews on sitejabber.com, they could not find them. I tried to contact sitejabber several times, but never got any response, except from automated messages. In contrast to Trustpilot, never ever, someone from sitejabber responded to me, with one interesting exception: When I jumped into the role of a online business manager, sitejabber contacted me, even before I asked them to do so. But this is another story.

Probably, when the reviewed website’s manager contacts sitejabber and complains about a critical review, this critical review will be hidden from the public. It is the first level of bias at sitejabber: Prompt response to business complaints but no response to critical customers. This is my repeated experience.

By taking offline critical reviews sitejabber obviously helps fraudulent business practices to remain undiscovered. However, it is worse: The author is not even been notified.

As soon as you have logged in at sitejabber.com, all your reviews are visible for you. Also, your reviews counts for the overall rating of businesses. However, for another visitor, your reviews might be suppressed. sitejabber may even show different ratings to others than to you.

If you write a review on sitejabber, you will be informed by email, when sitejabber receives your review. When your review goes online, sitejabber sends you another email. These steps are standard procedures and such notifications are not very interesting for the author. In contrast, if sitejabber takes your review offline, sitejabber will not tell you. sitejabber even creates a different version of their website for you. This different version makes you believe that all reviews are visible on sitejabber.

Not enough that sitejabber covers up critical reviews. sitejabber even hides this censorship systematicaly to the authors of critical reviews. This is not a random mistake in the system. I consider this fraudulent deception.

This example shows how sitejabber suppresses my critical review on 1matching.com. The two screenshots testify how sitejabber shows different results about 1matching:

In this example, sitejabber calculates a rating of 3.5 stars for me. To others, sitejabber shows a clean five-star rating. Also, my review on 1matching.com is not visible for others. The following snippets show the differences:

You do not need to believe me. You can find out yourself. Write a critical review on sitejabber and see what will happen. Contact sitejabber and find out how they respond.

And please let others know, what you find out. You can send me an email. Please include a screenshot if possible.

While writing this article, this morning, I logged into sitejabber and the first review sitejabber showed me was about sitejabber’s competitor ebay:

Today, sitejabber teaches me how competitor ebay removes critical reviews. The difference between sitejabber and ebay is the following: On ebay, Sally can see that her review has been removed. sitejabber goes one step further and tricks you into believing that they still appreciate your critical view.

Lies don’t travel far. Today, I opened sitejabber.com and searched for „sitejabber.com“. Yes, at sitejabber.com you can find reviews on sitejabber itself. I looked for the one-star reviews and found a lot of them telling exactly the story I am telling here.

You can see these reviews yourself on sitejabber.

You can also find these reviews archived on archive.org (captured 2021-12-05).

By taking offline critical reviews unwanted by reviewed websites without consulting or even notifying the review's author, sitejabber automatically and systematically rises the scores of websites complaining about their critical reviews. This makes it possible for questionable businesses to cover up their shady business methods or even their fraud. Such practice reduces sitejabber's value as review site to absurdity.

Not enough to allow this kind of censorship on its review site, sitejabber even actively covers up this censorship. To consumers, whose critical review is taken offline for the public, sitejabber fabricates and presents a different version of the review site where their own censored reviews still appear to be online. This practice makes sitejabber not only useless as a review site for consumers. With this practice sitejabber actively and knowingly engages itself in the cover up game of fraud.