RUSH: No, no, no, no. We want to blanket the United States in honor of Betsy Ross. We want to blanket the country with Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirts. And the best way, the only way to get a real one is at RushLimbaugh.com, and, once you’re there, find the “Store” tab. There is a specific URL for the store, but it’s much longer than RushLimbaugh.com. Just go there and you’ll be up and running.
CALLER: Awesome. Hey, Rush, good to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: I wanted to talk about the Stand Up for Betsy Ross T-shirts and now knockoffs can actually easily destroy a small business. It’s something that happened in my business and it forced me to close earlier this month.
RUSH: Explain how.
CALLER: Yes. So if you create a knockoff, e-commerce platforms like Shopify let users import thousands of fake reviews just via a spreadsheet, and those reviews aren’t validated like they are on Amazon. And then Google blindly indexes those reviews and up-ranks the site for having what’s called user generated content. If you want to become number one on Google, upload a few thousand fake reviews, and Google does the rest. That happened to me. A rich guy in California did it to me, outranked me on Google, and I went from being a viral company two years ago to having to close my doors this month.
RUSH: And right there in the mix is Google with a bunch of phony reviews and phony popularity ratings.
CALLER: It’s a rampant issue all over on the internet and —
RUSH: I know. And sending people to fraudulent sites and fraudulent places. I’m sorry that happened to you. I totally understand it, seeing what’s happening here, 200-plus knockoffs, and one of them now charging $1,500, unbeknownst to customers, who are probably being steered to these fraudulent places in the way you describe.
Related Links