It’s up to you, but you’re welcome to mention names when sharing an honest opinion, and if you do I’d suggest including a link. That way people can also have a look and decide for themselves. As mentioned in our article above, “a sudden increase in positive or negative reviews over a short time frame that are out of sync with earlier reviews” can be a sign of fakery.
I don’t think I can improve on the The Shed at Dulwich example, but I’ll add even without some form of trickery that online reviews can be a slippery tool to rely on. This article in the The Atlantic offers an interesting read:
… Online reviewers, they found, were more likely to give premium brands higher ratings, and rarely compared a variety of similar devices in the same setting, as Consumer Reports does by default.
Ultimately, the researchers found that consumers tend to accept as true the collective wisdom that Amazon conveys about a particular item’s durability, safety, and performance. “We don’t want to say that online reviews are completely untrustworthy and have no value whatsoever,” Bart de Langhe, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Colorado Boulder and the co-author of the study, told me. “But we do want to point out there are strong issues with them, and that in many situations you might be better off relying on expert tests.”
