[aerosmile]

People are comparing Trustpilot to Yelp, but having worked with both I can tell you that Trustpilot is far more evil for one simple reason:

  Trustpilot optimizes their SEO to rank for search terms that include the "negative review" phrase.

You can see that quite plainly both in their source code (search for "negative") or empirically by observing their rankings for "[company name] reviews" vs "[company name] negative reviews." I'll let your mind extrapolate from here all the fun powerplay scenarios that result from this company strategically positioning itself to be the magnet for all your most vocal haters.

Once Trustpilot has your profile up on their site, they will quickly start ranking for the "negative" phrase. You will be tempted to squash down those negative reviews by redirecting your positive reviews there, which will then also give them higher ranking for all of your review-related phrases - including the negative one. At this point you're locked in - without your intervention, your average rating on Trustpilot will always be lower than on any other service, and in order to counterbalance that, you will be helping Trustpilot's SEO more than any other service. Game set match.

What to do? I would suggest four main principles:

1. They will eventually get your profile, you cannot escape that. But what you can do is create a profile yourself that will be crippled in SEO (eg: wrong TLD, or slight mispelling, perhaps an extra word, etc). You might have to take several swings at this, but the goal would be to come up with a name for your company that i) ranks for your correctly spelled name in their internal search, but ii) is not competitive in the global SEO race with other companies that have your correct spelling.

2. Pick a different review service that's more honest and will work with you on a good faith basis. I found the BBB to be the most business-friendly of all of them (a bit surprising, I know). They just simply don't operate as a VC-run business that has to grow fast at all costs, and as a result, they won't turn on your like other services do (eg: it's in the services' interest to keep the content on the site, and the BBB will take things down more aggressively than any other service I know). Once you pick your canonical 3rd party review service, make them the #1 in SEO for your name by ensuring that they always have an order of magnitude more content than any other service.

3. You might be pressured to send content to Trustpilot to make up for the bad reviews. Do as little of that as possible, and each time you do that, send 10x more content to your chosen service.

4. Some people (usually those meaning to inflict the most harm) will always choose to leave their 1-star reviews on an external site so that they cannot be taken down. But you can definitely lower that volume by making it exceptionally easy for people to leave a review on your own site. That approach is far more favorable because you have a lot more options to turn the sentiment of the reviewer from negative to positive (assuming you're willing to do some custom coding). You'll still need a 3rd party review service (eg: Yotpo) so that your ratings can show up in Google Shopping etc, but you can collect those by sending all your purchasers that standard "review your purchase" email. If they leave a bad review using that service, you'll have the full context and will be able to react accordingly. Apart from that email, make sure that people can leave a review on your site without having to verify their purchase. In my experience, a substantial portion of customers doesn't realize why unverified reviews are discouraged and often not even available, which drives them to Trustpilot. So regardless if you're using Yotpo or some other service (most of which don't allow unverified reviews), make sure that a customer can click on a "review this product" button right on your site. I'll let you figure out 1) how to make this happen, and 2) what to do if in that case someone selects a 1-star review (hint: put your best foot forward right then and there).