Jason Pantana

View Original

How to Manage Missing, Removed, and/or Filtered Google Reviews

Jason Pantana
See this content in the original post

#GoogleReviews gone missing or hidden⁉️ Turns out, Google reportedly—per a recent Uberall study—reigns supreme in terms of having the highest percentage of “unauthentic” reviews. Revel in your glory, Google 🫠

Here’s the breakdown:

  • Google:  10.7% of reviews are fake

  • Yelp:  7.1% of reviews are phony

  • TripAdvisor:  5.2% of reviews are artificial

  • Facebook:  4.9% of reviews are bogus

Consequently, Google’s intensified the, quote-unquote, “strictness” of its automated review filter.

See this content in the original post

So, of course, the natural solution is to punish the innocent by un-publishing perfectly legit reviews. Right!? Meanwhile, prank reviews or fake-account haters continue to operate seemingly unchecked. 

Although, in fairness, Google appears to be aware of this issue and has offered assurance that they’re “working on it.”

See this content in the original post

Notwithstanding, here are a couple of checks to hopefully reduce the odds of your customers’ reviews getting removed:

  1. Don’t designate that your business offers free Wi-Fi on your Google Business Profile. It seems Google is able to detect whether the IP address of the machine you access to manage your business listing matches-up with that of your customers’ devices when they submitted their reviews. The thought is that it could make any outside networks (i.e, IPs) looks spammy—or, more likely—that it appears as though you’ve basically setup a “review-collecting booth” on site at your business, which is a policy violation.

  2. Be wary of soliciting for out-of-area reviews. If a reviewer’s recent locations, for instance, doesn’t reflect that they’ve visited anywhere proximate to your business address, it could raise a flag. Moreover, if their detected location at the time of leaving the review is WAY out of range of your business, that also looks rather suspect—so try to avoid it.

If a legitimate review fails to publish or get’s filtered from your Google Business Profile (formerly dubbed, Google My Business), your best recourse for the time being is to submit a claim ticket.