How listings and reviews are moderated

Nothing goes live on its own

Every company, brand, product, review and owner reply is submitted unpublished and stays that way until an administrator approves it. That applies to the first version and to every later one: editing an approved listing returns it to the queue, so a page cannot be changed into something different after it was checked.

We do not publish a listing and moderate it afterwards. The trade is that approval takes time; the benefit is that nothing reaches a reader unread.

The queue is worked oldest first, and a paid plan moves an account's submissions to the front of it. That decides when something is read, never how it is judged - the standard is the same whether a company pays or not. What a plan costs.

What Verified means

The listing belongs to the business it names, and the date of that check is recorded. It is a statement about identity and nothing else. It is not a rating, not a recommendation, and not a judgement about the quality of anyone's work.

There are two ways it is granted. An administrator can confirm a listing by hand. Or a company can publish our badge on its own website, at its own domain, and we read it back - controlling the domain a business trades under is a statement about identity, which is what this badge is. It cannot be bought either way.

A listing with no Verified badge has not failed a check. In most cases nobody has asked for one.

What is paid for

Three things on this site are commercial. Two of them are labelled wherever they appear; the third changes nothing a reader sees.

Paid placement

A company can pay to be lifted above the standard ordering on listing and category pages. Wherever that happens the badge says Sponsored, and it links here. Paid placement buys position. It does not buy a Verified badge, it does not change a rating, and it cannot remove a review.

Queue position

A paid plan moves an account's submissions to the front of the moderation queue, so they are read sooner. It changes when a submission is read and nothing else. The same person applies the same standard to it, a paid listing is refused for exactly the reasons a free one is, and nothing about queue position appears on any page a reader sees.

Advertising

Pages carry Google advertising, capped at three units per page. Those units are chosen by Google, not by us, and nothing an advertiser does affects where a company appears.

Featured is not the same as Sponsored, and is never paid for. Two things earn that label and neither involves money. A company that publishes our badge on its own website earns a lift on the categories it appears in, and anybody can check that one - the badge is on the company's own home page, in public. And our editors pick listings to lift on the home page and in the listings, which is a judgement rather than a transaction. Hovering the badge says which of the two it is. A paid placement always sorts above both.

Everything else - listing a company, being reviewed, appearing in a category, ranking on Top rated - is free and cannot be bought. The leaderboards state their own ranking rule on the page.

Reviews

A review needs an account with a confirmed email address, and it is read by an administrator before it appears. One review per person per company. The company being reviewed can reply once, publicly, and that reply is moderated too.

We do not remove reviews on request. Not for the company, and not for a payment. A review comes down only if it breaks a rule - it is not about a real engagement, it names a private individual, it discloses something confidential, or it is abusive. A company that believes a review is fabricated can tell us, with reasons, and an administrator decides.

Ratings shown on a profile are recalculated from the published reviews. Nobody types one in.

How the order is decided

Two kinds of page list companies, and they are ordered differently. Neither order is random and neither is purely merit, so both are written out here.

Category and browse pages

Paid placements come first and are labelled Sponsored, then editorial picks and listings that earned a lift by publishing our badge, both labelled Featured. Everything below that is ordered by rating, then by name. Every listing was approved by a person before it appeared, and editing one sends it back for approval. Ratings come from reviews we moderate; we do not write them.

The leaderboards

Ordered by average rating, then by how many reviews that average rests on, then by whether the business has been verified. A company needs at least 1 approved review to appear at all, and nothing on this page is paid for. Every listing and every review on this page was approved by a person, and each account may review a company once. A business connected to whoever runs this directory is excluded from this ranking rather than labelled.

Listings we wrote ourselves

Some profiles were written by our editors from published sources rather than submitted by the company, so that the directory is useful before it is complete. Those pages carry the same approval process and the same date stamps as any other. Any company can take over its own listing, free, and correct anything we got wrong.

If something here is wrong

Tell us. A wrong phone number, a business that has closed, a review that is not from a real client, a specification that is out of date - all of it is worth reporting, and it is the fastest way to fix a page.