As mentioned above, PCMag’s parent company j2 Global recently
established a connection to the VPN market with the purchase of
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commerce program. But our analysts (including me) are salaried and do
not receive a cut of any money generated by our reviews. Additionally,
we’re intentionally kept ignorant of business arrangements among our
employers and vendors and have a strict policy of editorial integrity.
That means I test VPNs extensively, I publish reviews with ratings based
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with our reviews. Often, they’re a catalyst for companies to improve
their products.
That’s not necessarily true for other sites, and a good chunk of the VPN
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To be clear: There are good VPN reviews from sites like PCMag that rely
on their reputation for authority. Others are just empty posts peddling
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programs can enable bad behavior. This makes it even harder to sift
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Michael Kan investigated TheBestVPN.com. That site, headed by an
individual with an ever-shifting set of names, aggressively sought
backlinks from other sites to move up in search rankings, which in turn
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earning links even from PCMag. Now, we don’t know whether the
content produced on TheBestVPN (or any of its other incarnations) is
bogus, but it’s not looking good when the owner (and perhaps sole
employee) can’t put his name on the work or defend it.
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