Editorial policy

Independence

BetterShoes is not owned by, funded by, or operated on behalf of any shoe brand or retailer. No brand can pay for a rating, a rank, a listing or a mention. We do not accept free product in exchange for coverage, and no commercial relationship has any input into how a shoe scores.

Structurally, ratings are computed from review data before pricing or affiliate information is attached to a shoe at all. There is no step in the pipeline where a commission rate could influence a score.

How reviews are moderated

• Only complete reviews that pass moderation are published or counted.
• Submissions are scored for manipulation signals — duplicate content, implausible submission behaviour, unusual volume from one source. Anything flagged is held for a human to look at before it can affect a rating.
• We publish critical reviews. A shoe scoring badly is information, and suppressing it would make every other score meaningless.
• We do not edit the substance of a review. We may decline to publish one that is abusive, off-topic, or clearly not about the shoe.

Corrections

Specs, categories and prices are drawn from manufacturer and retailer data, and some of it is wrong. When we find or are told about an error, we correct it at the source so every page derived from it updates.

Report anything that looks wrong to [email protected]. Tell us the shoe and what is wrong with it; that is enough.

Rankings change

Because scores are recomputed as reviews arrive and prices move, a shoe's rank is a snapshot rather than a verdict. We do not freeze rankings to keep a page stable, and we do not hand-adjust positions.

What we will not publish

• Reviews of shoes the reviewer has not run in.
• Ratings aggregated from other websites presented as our own.
• Pages that exist only to rank in search rather than to answer a real question.