Will buying App Store Reviews actually impact your keyword rankings?
Late last year, I bought a template of a beautiful app to see what magic I can sprinkle on it. I launched it, ran some ASO and ended up buying tons of reviews to see what will happen. After buying over a hundred reviews for this app, we started ranking for keywords which we were targeting. For one such keyword, for example, I placed them in the app title and in the app description and we were not ranking for them at all on 02/14. After that, I did nothing except add reviews with a mixture of 4 to 5 stars and in doing so, we ranked 17th. Other keywords also jumped up in the rankings.
Apart from the curiosity on what will happen to my keyword ranking, I was also curious if I will get in trouble by doing this and was elated that it did not have any negative impact. I can now get back to you to let you know that, if you want something to happen to your rankings on the iOS side, this is one way to do it.
Yo Steve! do you have some links to app review sellers who can target by location (eg. UK only) or store (apple v google)?