The problem with step 1 is that the average person no longer trusts a major sites opinion any more than a crappy review site. If the result shows in Google's first page a lot of people will take this as meaning it is legitimate, and generally even one or two negative reviews can make people start to ignore the 100's of positive ones. That is what a lot of these review farming sites seem to rely on, and most seem to manage to be in the top 5 search results for a lot of products, usually by linking or copying several legit reviews as well as spamming their own.