123-reg and google reviews, I think someone needs to "Quit making stuff up"

So the 123-reg.co.uk nameservers stopped working for a period today, not totally surprising as they have been pretty poor as a domain host, all things considered.


So I tried to add a back-up nameserver in the hope that some email might get delivered while somebody puts 50p in the meter at 123-is-it-up-again-yet-456-no-i-dont-think-so.co.uk but I see this glorious page full of error:


 


As I looked for the support@123-reg.co.uk email or contact form, I noticed this little gem in the page footer...





4 and half stars eh, maybe its just me.

I do tend to spend some time poking around in things that probably don't bother the majority of domain host clients. So I clicked through, to see some of these reviews.

At this point I was pretty dubious, and was expecting to see some static html page of reviews, that had been nicely curated by the 123-reg.co.uk marketing department. You know the sort of thing...

"123-reg literally saved my life, and my children's lives, and my job, and they are all very nice people" - The Intern.


But rather surprisingly it sends you off to a google.co.uk/products page, with genuine, real-life reviews. How odd.




So, a genuine 4.4 stars based on 129 reviews. It must be me then.

Looking over to the review sources I see this:






 So given that I am thinking about a new laptop I thought I would check-out Ciao and reviewcentre.com and see what they are up to these days.

So...

Clicking through to the reviewcentre.com page for 123-reg.co.uk suggests a paltry 2 of 5 stars rating:



and the first page of reviews includes mostly complaints:





OK, so reviewcentre.com hasn't been crawled by googlebot lately.

How about ciao.co.uk, maybe that is where google is getting its 4.4 stars from:




 And from the breakdown, its pretty clear the most popular rating for 123-reg.co.uk for customers was 1 star;




 At best that looks like 2.5 out of 5 stars.



But its a similar story at trustpilot.co.uk with (by a rough calculation 3.75 stars):











My trust in marketing material is completely destroyed, I am never going to believe marketing material provided by the supplier, ever EVER again!

(or google, now they should know better....;-)