I find crazy that ultra-important marketing companies can suddenly announce that “OMG”, now… only until now ratings affect rankings. Holy Cow. Really?
It’s pretty obvious that this has always been the case, in fact rantings is one of those factors that the App store will have always difficulty ignoring .
How can app companies really fake ratings? It’s almost impossible not to raise a red flag.
The reason? Simply Algorithm variables.
As we all know in this whole app store optimization game, we are playing with an Algorithm… and Google, iOS, Amazon, Nokia (mmm who the heck owns a Nokie), or Windows… use an algorithm.
For the reviews to make sense, they need to have a co-relation with the number of downloads. If 90% of apps get X reviews based on 1000 downloads, therefor this becomes the average number of reviews an app may get after X amount of downloads.
This “average number” is pretty difficult to predict and it’s very easy to screw it up if you are buying reviews.
If your app has 1000 downloads and you buy 100 reviews, you may “break” that average and that may raise the flag on your app….
Crazy concept?
Think twice, this is the way Google de-index sites and the way websites get penalized. Variables that don’t fit the average….
That’s why claiming that UNTIL now the App store (iOS) uses ratings for rankings is … well… a bit naive.