Our review process is the same for all of the articles, categories and niche areas that you’ll find on any of our brand websites. Whether we are reviewing pet food, smart home gadgets, or composting bins, we focus on collecting, collating, analyzing and organizing all the reviews we can find or experience first-hand into one cohesive review to help you make the best, most informed purchasing decision. We research and fact check our information, and integrate the feedback of our readership to bring you the most unbiased reporting we can.
Our Review Process
- Extensive industry research
- Independent expert reviews
- Anonymous consumer phone calls & email inquiries to the company (mystery shopping)
- Consumer feedback on our website
- Consumer reviews on third-party review sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, the Better Business Bureau and more.
- Social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
So while we do not always have the time or ability to review everything first-hand ourselves (due to cost, availability or other reasons), we have built a review process that, since 2005, works to provide an overview of every review we can find out there on the given topic we are discussing. This allows us to provide one of the most comprehensive, diverse, and unbiased reviews of any given product, service or category we cover.
How to Judge The Integrity of an Internet Review
Because we are regularly asked how someone can trust the credibility of an online review, we have decided to put together this quick checklist you can use to determine if your favorite review site is legitimate. We want you, the reader, to be able to rely on our research, and we want you to return to our site and view it as a trusted resource in the security industry. Here’s some things to look for in a review site to help establish its legitimacy:
- About Us and Contact Us pages
- A Disclosure Policy that mentions if and how reviewers are compensated, how comments are handled, and more.
- An explanation of review criteria (i.e. how a winner is chosen).
- Look for each article to have an established author (you can also look in the Google results to see if a page has an associated author, this means they are participating in the Google authorship program, which is designed to establish a network of trusted writers).
Have questions regarding our review policy or would you like to show us an example of a review site you feel may have bias? Don’t hesitate to leave us your feedback and we’ll respond as soon as possible.