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Often I see people reviewing different products to the one on the page.

This is common. Some products are considered a version of others. Sometimes it's OK like different colour or different size. But sometimes it's not.

Worst case is same product sold by different vendors that isn't the same product at all because one of them is fake.

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Vendors will often swap out a successful product with a completely different one because the listing has a lot of good reviews. This is incredibly common on Amazon. Just change the name, description, photos and everything else and continue getting the search boost.

That shouldn't even be possible, in my opinion. Imagine taking a popular tweet and changing out all the wording, leaving the likes and retweets now supporting a very different message.

Yes, that is exactly what it is. Actually what you mentioned happens on forums like Reddit all the time. Getting a top comment in a thread is very valuable, and later on you can edit it to say anything. With internet groupthink being what it is, people will open a discussion, see the top few most-upvoted comments and assume they are true and those are the views they should take on the topic.

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