Italian Authorities Fine TripAdvisor $610,000 For Not Preventing Invalid Negative Reviews

The New York Times reports TripAdvisor, the large travel reviews site, has been fined by Italian authorities for not preventing fake negative reviews on their site.

The Italian Competition Authority fined TripAdvisor 500,000 euros, about $610,000 US, for allowing the “publishing misleading information about the sources of its reviews.” They also gave the company 90-days to remove these “misleading” reviews from their site and prevent it from happening it in the future.

“We think the ruling is unreasonable,” the a TripAdvisor spokesperson said in a statement. “We fight fraud aggressively and are very confident in the systems and processes we have in place.”

The New York Times says this is the first time a reviews site has faced serious fines in the European Union or the Unites States over not preventing false reviews.

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.