Glossary

Terms

Drip feeding Legitimately: spacing review asks over time. In vendor pitches: spacing fake reviews to evade detection — it does not work.
Retention How long reviews stay live. Earned reviews persist; purchased ones decay in waves.
Velocity Reviews per month. Safe when it tracks customer volume.
Removal wave A batch deletion of policy-violating reviews after a classifier update.
Filter update A platform's periodic improvement to fake-review detection.
Managed timeline A review schedule run by a vendor — the signature of purchased reviews.
Baseline A profile's historical velocity, used by filters to judge spikes.
Cliff pattern A sudden vertical drop in a profile's review graph — the visible scar of a removal wave.
Canonical URL The authoritative address search engines use for a page.
Noindex A robots directive excluding pages from search results.