Review Guidelines

What Are the Goals for HighYa Reviews?

• To help people find trustworthy companies, software, products, and services
• To provide readers with useful tips and to highlight important features
• To report scams and other fraudulent activity
• To build a community

What Can Be Reviewed on HighYa?

Includes the following but not limited to:

• Online Services
• Online / Cloud-Based Software
• Online Education
• Beauty & Health Products
• Tech/Electronics
• Personal Finance, Loans, Real Estate
• Home & Garden
• Online Jobs / Income Opportunities
• Online Entertainment (Movie / TV services; not adult websites)
• No X-rated / adult content
• Pretty much anything that takes place on the world wide web

What Qualities Make a Great Review?

• Providing a personal experience / Telling your story
• Truthful accounts based on factual information
• Detail, detail, detail
• Written with the goal of providing helpful and relevant information
• Passion about the topic. (But please, refrain from profanity and hatefulness).
• Well-formatted. Lengthy reviews are good, but remember to use multiple paragraphs to improve readability.
• Free of spelling and grammatical errors
• Avoid bad habits such as writing in all caps and using excessive exclamation marks.

What Qualities Result in a Poor Review?

• Profanity, hate speech, threats, etc. These will not be tolerated.
• Plagiarism. Under no circumstances should reviews from other websites be copied.
• Reviews intented for promotional and/or commercial purposes (i.e. containing affiliate links)
• Self-promotion. Do not write reviews about your own business.
• Exaggeration, or “stretching the truth.” Just stick to the facts.
• Companies or hired third parties posing as consumers to artificially boost their overall rating on HighYa

What About a Negative Experience?

• Reviews about negative experiences are perfectly acceptable, as long as they are based on fact.
• Keep in mind that most businesses want to make things right. If you have a negative experience with a company, we strongly encourage to try to resolve the issue first, before posting a negative review. This way, your review will be more helpful because you’ll have some insight into their customer support.
• Remember, your opinions are generally protected, but false information could have legal ramifications (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel).

What Do We Mean by Saying “Relevant” All the Time?

As you’ll continue reading through these review guidelines, you’ll come across the word “relevant” more than a dozen times. So what defines review relevancy in HighYa’s instance?

• Reviews that are clear, truthful and fact based
• Reviews that add supplemental content value for the readers
• Reviews that share in-depth opinions
• Reviews that provide advice

Does HighYa Remove Reviews?

Not always but sometimes. We respect your opinion. However, a review may be removed if it does not comply with our guidelines (e.g.: includes hate speech, profanity, etc.), if it is proven to be exaggerated or untrue, contains plagiarism, appears to be fake/spammy, and/or is not relevant to the topic.

In addition, if a consumer who at an earlier point left a negative review on HighYa was able to successfully resolve his or her issue and/or dispute afterward with the company, and attempts to contact us in order to accurately update it, we will certainly be in favor of modifying accordingly at the consumers request.

We also provide the technical platform for the user to update his/her review on their own should they wish to do so. Or the user can request to remove it altogether if they wish, and we’ll proceed accordingly. 

Additionally, we may take down reviews provisionally should the company to whom the review belongs to, flags it using their free business tools or brings it to our attention via email or our contact form. While the review is provisionally taken down, we reach out to the individual (at the email associated with their particular consumer review) who left the review to attempt to clarify and further investigate based on the nature for which the company flagged it.

A company can flag a review if they believe it’s defamatory, was intended for a different product/service, and/or if they claim the customer isn’t in their database, or if there's a pending legal matter with that consumer (litigation or not).

We don’t take sides but do provisionally take down reviews at times while we reach out to the customer to receive additional clarifications (such as additional proof of purchase or permission to pass their email to the business so that the company can verify whether that email address is in their customer database, at company's requests). A review may stay down if the customer does not respond to our inquiry.

We don't take down reviews simply because a company does not like the consumer's opinion and disagrees with the results the customer may have experienced with their product or service. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

If a review complies with our guidelines at first assessment and goes live, meaning it had a verified email, the content of the review demonstrates/articulates that user used the product and/or went past the point of purchase (and is evaluating shipping, billing, customer services), does not contain commercial speech, does not have a suspicious/dubious entailed IP, it will go live, and afterward, it is the company's responsibility to flag and bring any concern they may have to our attention. 

Finally, in certain instances, if we do discover at a later point that a certain review we’ve already published actually turns out to be non-genuine and non-truthful, irrelevant, upon newly discovered facts not evident during the first round of initial assessment, we do reserve the right to remove it from our website.

Also, one user can only submit one review for a single product. A user, can, however, update his/her existing review on that same product or service if they wish to, at any point in time.

We At HighYa strive to make sure that information is relevant and useful for readers to the best of our ability and as a result, we’re constantly refining and improving our assessment process to help ensure increased chances of review authenticity, relevance, and credibility.

With that said, a review that was assessed and published prior may very well be removed at a later point if it does not comply with newly added and refined guidelines and assessment methods. Our goal is to try and provide relevant and useful information to the readers.

Does HighYa Review Every Single Review Submitted to the Website?

Reviews that are submitted from users who registered and verified their emails after writing their reviews are read and assessed. We receive many reviews from users who didn’t verify their emails, those simply are not assessed until the reviewer verifies his/her email by clicking the activation link sent to them.

We have a team of members that dedicate a considerable amount of time reviewing every single verified-user review that comes in every day to help with increasing chances that they comply with our review guidelines, are relevant and genuine, are clear and suitable for the readers and contain no profanity, hate speech, nor commercial purposes.

As a result of HighYa’s review of each review, it can take up to 7 business days for a customer review to appear as they're assessed on a first-come-first-serve basis in our queue.

Does HighYa Edit Any Reviews Before Publishing?

Sometimes we do, yes. As mentioned right above, we review every single user-email verified review prior to publishing them because sometimes certain ones will contain profanity and our staff will censor it out and replace it with an appropriate and family-friendly substitute word.

In addition, certain reviews that enter our site will contain spelling mistakes and grammatical and mechanical errors. As a result, the staff members will certainly proofread them in order to fix them to make them as suitable and user-friendly as possible. However, never do we change one's opinion or nature of a review.

Will Certain Reviews Never Get Published Nor Made Visible to the Public?

Unfortunately, yes. We do reserve the right to not publish certain reviews for a number of reasons should we feel necessary. In short, we don’t publish reviews if they simply don’t comply with our review guidelines (unethical, non-genuine, contain too much hate speech, irrelevant, commercially/promotionally intended, etc.). Essentially, our goal as a company is to aim to provide the utmost genuine and relevant information to the reader. That is the big picture.

Other than that, we are always in favor of publishing all reviews should they be negative or positive, just as long as they comply with our guidelines and are relevant and truthful. Also, users must register for user accounts and confirm their email via an activation link sent by our automated systems immediately upon submission in order for their review to be assessed and made live. If the email of the user who left the review is not verified, the review will not be published until and if the user verifies it via an activation link that gets sent to them immediately upon registration (or via a follow-up automated reminder containing an activation link sent out 24-48 hours later). As a user leaves a review, we try our best to walk the user through the process of registration and verifying his/her email. In addition, a reminder email gets sent out to users asking them to verify their email a couple of days after their initial registration should they have not yet confirmed their email during the initial sign up.

Now with that said, right below are the major reasons as to why you could expect to see certain reviews not published to the public on HighYa, should they be in favor of a particular company or not:

Reason 1: Consumers Can’t Leave Reviews on Products, Services, and Companies They Haven’t Used and/or Submitted Purchase Orders For

One of the major requirements we have for someone who is leaving the review is that the individual must have used the product or service that he or she is reviewing. In addition, to leave a review, this includes the fact that the consumers must’ve at least purchased the product to be eligible to leave a valid review. Sometimes certain reviews that come into our site simply don’t show any sign of the person who is submitting it to have actually used the product nor did they go past the point of purchase.

Sometimes the review that comes in is just an opinion and observation, which we’re thankful for of course but we can’t publish it because the individual even stated that he or she has never purchased nor used the product.

A review is also valid if the consumer went past the point of purchase but hasn’t actually used the product itself. Here’s why: In certain instances, the customer of a particular company did not use the product yet because there were billing, shipping, and customer services issues which resulted in him/her not receiving the product at the time of writing his/her review.

For example, a consumer made a purchase for product ABC, spent $50 and was promised that the product would arrive in 5-7 business days. The product did not arrive in that timeframe and the customer got frustrated since customer service was of no help although customer already spent $50. That would entitle the customer to leave a review on the company reflecting their experience.

So once a person goes past the point of purchase and is experiencing shipping, billing and customer services issue reflecting his/her purchase, that qualifies for a valid consumer review as he/she already has factual experiences and opinions formed on company management, and operations.

Please remember, when someone submits a review on HighYa, prior to pressing the “Post It” button, he/she marks off the checkbox in our disclaimer that basically indicates that by sharing their review on the product, they acknowledge that they are not an employee of company and have actually used the product/service before.

Reason 2: Irrelevant Reviews

As mentioned above, we manually review every single piece of content that enters our website from the reader side. With that said, we get the occasional “Mess-Arounds” or something completely irrelevant, so obviously we just disregard those. In addition, sometimes reviews come in that completely don’t make sense. In many instances, we can identify what the reviewer tried to convey in the review. Therefore, we will edit accordingly to make it more suitable for readers. However, sometimes it’s just impossible to try to pinpoint what the reviewer was trying to say. In such scenarios, we simply do not publish the review. We promise that we really tried because we know the importance of every single genuine and truthful review coming in. However, it just doesn’t work out 100% of the time.

Reason 3: Posing as Consumers or Hire Third Parties to Do So

The next reason as to why we don’t publish certain reviews has got to be the most disappointing one. Unfortunately, the reality is that some companies will accumulate negative reviews overtime from numerous consumers. We certainly do not like to see that happen, but if there are plenty of unhappy consumers, they have every right to stress their frustration (Freedom of Speech, First Amendment). With that said, another sad yet true reality is that some of those very companies either themselves or “hired-third-parties” will pose as consumers in order to attempt to leave overly positive reviews in hopes to artificially boost their overall rating on our website. On the flip side, sometimes certain competitors of certain companies listed on review websites will attempt to submit fake negative reviews to try to plummet their competitor down in rating.

We’re certainly not in favor of this practice since it would conflict with our core value which is to strive to provide as accurate information as possible to our readers and safeguarding them. As such, by using our undisclosed proprietary algorithms and methods, we reserve the right to not publish reviews should they seem suspicious and raise red flags for any reason (including but not limited to when the IPs entailed of the submitted reviews appear to be masked and/or coming from VPN/Proxy Servers, we use third party tools to determine the origin source of the IP).

We figured if the author of the review will be concerned that his/her review did not get published, they can always reach out to us and we can address case-by-case, and typically an author of a review with ulterior motives will not go the extra mile while a consumer who wants to be heard will. Again, this is quite the common practice and we at HighYa try to filter out the misleading reviews in order to protect our readers to the best of our ability. We cannot guarantee 100% accuracy as any system such as Yelp, Amazon, TripAdvisor, etc. can be duped but we strive to remain transparent and diligent when assessing reviews.

What Can I Do If My Website or Company Received a Bad Review on HighYa?

It’s important to remember that, because you can’t please everyone all of the time, it’s inevitable that any business will eventually receive a negative review. However, if you do good work and provide a valuable service, one bad review will not hurt your overall reputation.

With that said, as a business, you can sign up for our business for HighYa profile which will give you the ability to receive instant alerts on any new reviews that enter for your product/service. Next, you’ll be able to respond as an officially verified company rep and the user will be alerted. Through this method, you will have the opportunity to resolve/dispute any negative review in the right way. You can learn more and sign up here. It’s absolutely free and always has been. No strings attached.

If you feel that a negative HighYa review is based on exaggeration or untruth, or that it’s factually inaccurate, and/or you have already made attempts to resolve the issue directly with your customer with no result, please contact us at hi@highya.com. We are accessible and fair.

Reason 4: Fake Reviews Is a Violation of HighYa's Review Guidelines and Terms of Use. Zero Tolerance Policy

Here at HighYa, we make an effort to strive to weed out any reviews that we believe are non-genuine. We manually assess every single review that comes from verified users (users who submit a review , register for an account, and verify their email via an activation link sent to their inbox directly immediately upon registration, or verify their email via their valid Facebook account) because we strive for the integrity of consumer reviews to safeguard the readers. If we believe there is suspicious activity entailed with the reviews submitted on a particular product, service or company, we reserve the right not to publish them, since each review is subject to manual assessment before it goes live. If we, at a later point discover that a review(s), upon newly discoverable information, maybe non-genuine, after it's been published live, we will remove that review(s) as well. 

If what we believe as malicious and deceitful intent of fake review submission attempts persists, we may investigate the matter even further and take appropriate action to help halt such conduct by the perpetrating party. Typically, manipulation of IP addresses may suggest that reviews are non-genuine, especially if there is a sudden uptick of the volume of reviews entering for a single product all containing dubious IP addresses.

Reason 5: Customers Cannot Submit a Second Review on the Same Product Again

A single user cannot submit another review for the same product for which they reviewed in the past. They can, however, update their existing review on that very product to reflect their most recent experience if they wish to do so. We provide the technical outfit for consumers to be able to log into their existing account, navigate to their reviews and select which review they wish to update. The review update entails the ability to modify the existing star rating, the title of the review, along with the actual body content. 

Bottom Line

We’re growing, evolving and learning. It is in our best interest to try and provide the most accurate and relevant information on products that consumers are searching for. We cannot guarantee 100% accuracy (No one can), but we strive to try to weed out non-genuine reviews.

With that said, we reserve the full right not to publish any consumer reviews coming in on HighYa should they not comply with our guidelines, provide little to no value and appear non-genuine.

Last revised on September 19, 2019