Meet an auto repair garage in Sheffield. A tip in a Facebook group claimed that setting your hours to 'open 24 hours' makes you show up in more searches and look more available. The owner, who actually worked 8 to 6, flipped his profile to round-the-clock.
For a while the calls came. Then the one-star reviews started.
'Drove there at 11pm, locked and dark.' 'Says 24 hours, nobody answered.' Within two months he'd collected six furious reviews from people who'd trusted the listing. His rating slid, his profile lost trust, and the trust signals dragged his ranking down with the reviews.
There was no ranking magic in false hours — only a slow-motion reputation fire.
We set his real hours, added a clear note about emergency-only after-hours contact, and went to work repairing the damage with honest review generation.
Real hours stopped the bleeding. Over the next three months his rating recovered from 3.9 to 4.6, and his genuine inbound calls — from people who could actually reach him — rose from 21 to 44 a week.
The lesson: accurate hours aren't a limitation to game, they're a trust signal — fake availability buys you angry reviews that cost you the ranking.
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The garage that set itself to '24 hours' to win more searches
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