Amazon made significant changes to its community guidelines at the beginning of this week, which are aimed at eliminating incentivized reviews, except for those that emerge from within its Amazon Vine program.

This will also allow Amazon to identify trusted reviewers, separate biased reviews from authentic ones and improve the overall reviewing process significantly.

Chee Chew, vice-president of customer experience at Amazon, published a blog post explaining the new changes.

"These so-called 'incentivised reviews' make up only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of reviews on Amazon, and when done carefully, they can be helpful to customers by providing a foundation of reviews for new or less well-known products," he wrote.

Amazon's updated community guidelines page now reads, "Creating, modifying, or posting content in exchange for compensation of any kind (including free or discounted products) is not allowed."

Amazon has a reputation for its averseness for incentivised reviews. In the past, the company has sued companies and individuals found to be violating its policy about incentivised reviews. Last year, Amazon sued four companies that it claims paid people to produce reviews.

An additional 1,000 people are set to face legal action as they submitted positive reviews on the site in return for payment or discounted products.

According to analysis website ReviewMeta, the average rating for products with incentivised reviews was higher than those for non-incentivised ones - a 4.74 average rating versus a 4.36 average rating, out of 5 stars.