Why does google remove reviews

Single Location Solutions for small business. Articles News, tips, and best practices. Login Watch Demo. Products Reviews. Google Reviews How to delete a Google Review. This includes posting multiple times, including from different accounts. Off-topic posts that are general in nature, such as political commentary or personal rants.

Promoting actions be taken or items purchased that fail to comply with local legal regulations. Such restricted content includes promoting alcohol, gambling, guns, pharmaceuticals, adult services, and more. Illegal or depict illegal activity, such as copyrighted content, endangered animal products, graphic violence, human trafficking, etc. Terrorist in nature. Sexually explicit or in any way sexually exploits children. Offensive, obscene, or profane. Dangerous, considered harassment or intimidating, or that incite hatred.

Impersonating others or having false representation. Dishonest or biased. Respond to the Review One of the first steps the business owner should take if they want to remove a Google review is to respond to the reviewer. Claim your business listing by visiting google. Follow these steps to flag a review: Log into Google My Business.

The Next Step When someone from the support team gets in contact with you, it is up to you to explain why the review should be removed.

Open Google Maps. Search for your business. Choose to view your business reviews. Select All Reviews. When you see the review you want to remove, click the three dots in the top right corner. How to Downplay Negative Reviews To downplay negative reviews, try these strategies: Calmly clarify the situation in your response to the negative review. Reconcile the situation and then politely ask your customer offline if they are willing to update their negative review to reflect the positive outcome.

Request and promote more positive customer reviews, which has the effect of pushing the few negative reviews down to the bottom of the search results. If so head back to Google Maps and then follow the steps below: In the top left-hand corner you will see the menu icon represented by three lines. Click this. You can then choose to either edit or delete the review. Click Menu in the top left corner. Click Your Contributions. Choose Reviews.

Any use of inappropriate content or profanity and racial terms in a review is grounds for removal. This also includes explicit content, offensive content, hate speech, harassment, and bullying. Sometimes businesses go to drastic measures to beat their competitors in the local search results. If multiple businesses in the same industry and in the same general area receive a bad review from one person in a relatively short timespan while leaving one competitor a glowing review, this is usually a sign the person behind the reviews is the competitor.

There has been some circumstance where a customer clearly, but accidentally left a review for the wrong businesses. This is easy to spot because they refer to products or services that are completely unrelated to what your business does.

In this case, you can either respond to the review and politely ask them to remove it or dispute the review with Google. Another good clue is the location of the user versus the location of the business. For example, if the user is in Florida, but they wrote a review about a location in Ohio and Texas in the same few days.

Via Super Heat and Air. Digital media is enabling the distribution of news and other stories. However, this means that if your store or location becomes the subject of a news article or story, you may begin to receive reviews from people all over the country. The problem comes when these people are commenting on news stories, voicing their opinions, making personal rants, etc. People can also submit reviews in the form of photos.

Many of the guidelines that apply to the text in reviews also apply to any visual content uploaded along with the reviews. Images should only depict the experiences being had at the actual location where the customer is leaving the review for.

Open Google Maps and Search for your business location. Click to view all of your business reviews. Follow the directions on the page. Google will walk you through the legal removal process.

If Google will not remove the review it is important you respond to the negative review. Apologize and thank them for their feedback — Negative reviews help corporations make changes to improve current business practices.

Apologize for the unsatisfactory experience and thank them for giving honest feedback. Your Google My Business reviews may not be missing at all! You may simply be experiencing a bug. Many small business owners have reported experiencing this bug off and on for nearly a decade. Select your business location that is having issues if you have multiple locations. This will open Google Maps.

It sounds silly, but give it a shot! Yes, it is possible that even a company as big as Google can have a glitch. Glitches are possible with every size system, no matter how big or how small. This one is super-unlikely, but yes, humans still need to be able to manually access systems that are designed to run autonomously. Why would an employee access your Google My Business page manually?

Can you think of any reason? I want to say upfront — I do not subscribe to a single one of these conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, once Google has removed a review from your Google My Business page, it is gone for good. There is no getting it back. Instead of worrying about getting missing reviews back, focus on getting new 5 star reviews!

Before you give up, however, check out tip 25 above to check if your Google My Business page is experiencing a bug. Make it part of your regular business process and start backing up your reviews, so you can analyze the reviews and to discover the reason a review is removed in the future.

When you get that notification email of a new Google My Business review, copy the review and the details. When you notice a drop in your number of reviews, take a look through your reviews to figure out which one s was deleted.

Focus on running your business and providing great service and products, then ask happy customers to leave a review of your business. Just go out there and get another great review to replace the one that disappeared. Keep doing it. Let the little stuff take care of itself. This is nonsense. Gosh I wonder why? Can you provide any evidence that Google does not remove your 5-star reviews. Of course you cannot. Google can do whatever they want.

These were never removed? The best written 5-star reviews that I had have been removed but not ones that were copied and also put on Facebook. According to you sir, those ones should have been removed but were not. So why are 1-star reviews never removed even if they make every violation you mention, and only 5-star reviews removed?

Not 2-star, not 3-start…just 5-star. How much does Google pay you each month pal? From my 20ish years experience in web development, marketing and working with small businesses — usually when a business owner makes these types of comments, it usually means the client is not being fully upfront about their practices around their reviews.

Rather than getting upset, actually look at your current and former practices to find your problem. I am happy to look into this for you, but not for free and I would expect an apology before doing so.

Best wishes. I would like to know why MY review of a business got deleted. I did make the mistake of writing a review after my husband had also written one on same company. I get that only one per household…. However, neither of our reviews are on there at all now. I would like to be able to re post this review. Hello I am trying to write fake reviews for my own business to get me started.

How do I get around this? Thank you! Uhh… No. That is unethical and you risk getting blacklisted in Google search results if you repeatedly get busted doing so. Hi, Really happy to see your efforts! I would like to know if I did one or two mistakes out of all these and google has detected it as spam. The mistake I did was 1. I was not aware of the spam so again and again, I asked my client to do edit and post again. But they were genuine and now my real reviews getting disappeared. This is so frustrating.

I spent an entire day talking with all my patients, kindly asking them to leave a review of my new Google My Business page. The entire day. Suddenly, half of them were deleted. No apparent reason. All honest reviews and from real people, my patients.

This is because businesses who hire companies or individuals such as on Fiverr to post fake reviews for a business will likely post them all at the same time. A mass influx of new reviews is a red flag. The laser whisperer in Ontario scammed me of thousands of dollars.. In fact all negative reviews have been removed. Can google review be trusted? See the article above.

There are lots of examples. When you can, upload photos, etc and include the URL in the review I upload images to imgur. I wrote a bad review for a horrible company we did business with.

The review stayed up for almost a year, but I noticed it had been removed recently. Any idea why? Was the company able to have it removed? Anyone here who has respect or time for Google is naive.

Utter waste of time asking customers for reviews, utter waste of time doing anything to jump through googles hoops. Same with Google Ads, you are dealing with poorly implemented automated junk. Its such a shame they have the monopoly and have no incentive to improve. I have spent months chasing a customer for a review. They were too busy and I was becoming a bit of a pain, but they took time in the end to write me a great review.

It has been removed by Google… its embarrasing to me and looks bad on my business that I have wasted my clients time asking them to do this for nothing. I had to make my staff redundant just before Christmas….. So any serious business cannot depend on Google, and investing anytime in Google is a risky business. My advice, track every change you make against the terms of service. Google Ads has long held the award for worst support on the planet. Truly incompetent.

The articles reads: Unfortunately, once Google has removed a review from your Google My Business page, it is gone for good. Without wanting to be disrespectful to the author, I see the same phrase published in numerous similar articles. When you put huge effort day in day out, with enormous sacrifices in personal time, family time, etc, to establish a good reputation , then it DOES matter whenever a single review gets lost due to a bug or due to a bad implementation of an algorithm.

Small businesses have small numbers of reviews. And the they DO matter, each and every one of them. Thanks for the comment. I understand your frustration, but my advice is still the same — rather than wasting time fighting to try to get back a review that was removed likely because one of the points mentioned above , spend that time to get new reviews instead.

Most happy customers will gladly leave a review for you when you ask and make the process easy to do.

There are all sorts of strategies to make the process function more smoothly and in a mostly automated manner, such as:. This will further entice them to review your business. My husband has the same issue today.