At the end of July I built ten demo websites for local businesses that never asked me for anything. This week I went back through them, one at a time, with a simple question for every sentence: where did this come from? Nine of the ten had at least one claim that didn't survive the question. None were code bugs. They were plausible-sounding lines written to fill a page, which is exactly why they slipped through.
What I found
The businesses stay anonymous here, but these were the mistakes, and they were mine.
- A pizzeria in the Algarve had a competitor's address. The door number had come from the postcode, misread in a hurry. The phone number matched no source, three of the six pizzas didn't exist, every price was wrong, and the map pin was 350 metres out.
- A barbershop advertised 5.0 stars when Google showed 4.8, and had a haircut filed under the "beard" heading. It also advertised Saturday afternoons when it closes at 1 pm on Saturdays. Anyone turning up at three would find the door shut.
- A takeaway grill house listed, as its only contact, a landline the owners themselves had announced was out of order, plus a Sunday dinner service that doesn't exist.
- A vet clinic showed Saturday hours that are suspended in July and August.
- A dental clinic had a star rating in its structured data and clinical claims with no source at all.
- A nail studio linked to an Instagram profile that is no longer available and promised prices on a page that had none.
- A car workshop linked to a Facebook page dormant since 2020 instead of the one they use today.
None of this looks serious on a screen. All of it is serious for someone who drives to the wrong address, calls a number nobody answers, or turns up on a Saturday afternoon to a locked door.
What I changed
Every fact has a source
I went back to the business's own sources: their Instagram and Facebook, the booking page they use, their Google Maps listing. The grill house now leads with the mobile number the owners gave for orders, in every button, in the footer and in the structured data. The landline stays, labelled, because Google still lists it. Each business's coordinates now come from its own map pin rather than an approximation. A builder with no public address ended up with no coordinates at all, which beats made-up ones.
The real services, under their real names
The nail studio had seven service categories I had written myself. The studio's own booking page lists twelve, under the names customers actually pick from. Now it's those twelve. The workshop was hiding half of what it does: car electrics, which is on its official service list, and key programming for motorbikes and heavy vehicles as well as cars. They speak English and the entrance takes a wheelchair, both worth knowing before you drive over.
The business's name, spelled their way
Two businesses sign their name differently from how I had written it. They now appear the way they write themselves, in the pages, the wordmarks and the structured data, with the other spellings kept as alternate names for anyone who searches for them.
No source, no sentence
The pizzeria kept its real dish names and lost the prices. Its published list has obvious errors, and copying it would repeat the very problem I was fixing. Where a business doesn't publish prices, the site says where to ask, rather than inventing a range. And none of the demos now carries a star rating in its structured data.
On the builder's site, the illustrative images gave way to photos of the company's own jobs, published by the company, with the origin of each one recorded.
Why it matters
Trust. A customer who finds one mistake on a site stops believing the rest. If the hours are wrong, maybe the prices are too.
The law. In Portugal, the unfair commercial practices regime (Decree-Law 57/2008, as amended by Decree-Law 109-G/2021, in force since May 2022) treats as misleading, among other practices, presenting false consumer reviews or recommendations, and claiming reviews come from real buyers without taking reasonable steps to check (article 8, points cc) and dd)). My demos are my own drafts; on a client's site it's the business speaking to the people who buy from it, and that's where this weighs. This is not legal advice; it's the reason I don't play with stars.
Google. Google's review snippet guidelines say that when a business controls the reviews about itself, its pages with LocalBusiness or Organization structured data are not eligible for star ratings. Putting a rating on your own site brings no stars in the results, only risk.
Customers who arrive expecting something else. An advertised service that doesn't exist means an awkward phone call, a wasted trip, a bad review. The site is there to bring customers in, not to let them down.
The rule I follow now
Every claim on a client's site needs a source: the business itself, its public listing, a document. If it has none, it goes. A site with fewer sentences, all of them true, sells better than one full of promises nobody can check. It's also quicker to review when the hours change.
You can see the corrected demos in the gallery. They are still examples, and still need confirming with each business before any of them goes live for real. If you want a site where every sentence survives "where did this come from?", get in touch.