Is your Google Business Profile Review missing because of a Google Error?
These are situations that can happen but are rare occurrences. If you’re missing reviews on your Google My Business page, one of the reasons below is much more likely to be the reason for your missing Google reviews.
UPDATE – July 21st,2022 – Google announced that a bug did occur with Google Business Profile reviews disappearing from the local business profiles due to algorithmic updates with Google Maps aimed at removing fake reviews.
“In our ongoing efforts to remove fake reviews from Maps, we’ve experienced an increase in reviews being removed from businesses. We are inspecting our tools and systems to ensure that any legitimate reviews are reinstated.” - Google
Now, this doesn’t mean these reviews or any reviews deleted in the past will definitely come back.
Here is what Google has to say about missing reviews: Click Here
1. Do you have reviews in other places online?
If you have tons of reviews on Google My Business, but none on Yelp, Facebook, etc., this could be a cause for the deleted reviews. Simply, it’s not natural and spontaneous if every single customer who reviews you leaves the review on Google My Business. This is a good indicator of spam.
2. Did the review appear elsewhere on the internet?
If the same review appears on Facebook, Yelp, or on a “testimonials” page on your website, the duplicate review on your Google My Business page could be removed. Isn’t it great when your customers love you SO much that they want to tell everyone how great you are?!?! This is the downside – unless the customer writes unique reviews on each review website, you may risk multiple reviews being removed, not just on Google Business Profile.
3. Is the reviewer a manager of your Google My Business account or Google+ page?
If a review is written by a manager of the business’s Google accounts, this could be seen as a conflict of interest by Google. Generally, the person managing your Google My Business account is not a customer. They are likely an employee or a service provider. Reviews should be left by customers.
4. Is the reviewer your employee?
When an employee reviews their employer on Google Business Profile, this can be seen as a conflict of interest – even if the employee has purchased your products or services. This practice is frowned upon because many employers will require that employees leave positive reviews or offer incentives for employees to leave reviews.
5. Was the review written from your physical business location?
What’s important here is the IP address (used to identify the physical location of your computer). If the review was written from an IP address used to manage your Google My Business account, the spam filter could have been triggered.
6. Was the review written from the same IP address as other reviews?
Similar to the previous point, if many reviews are coming from the same IP address outside of your business, the spam filers might be triggered. If this is happening, the reviews are most likely spam or fake. There’s no chance your business received 19 legitimate reviews from the same physical location.
7. Is there a “review station” set up at your business?
Remember what we talked about above – if all the reviews are coming from the IP address, they’ll trigger the spam detector. It’s a better plan to give your customers a short review URL that’s easy to remember and let them leave a review from their own cell phone.
8. Was your review written from a location that is TOO far away from your business location?
If your business sells products locally, but you also ship products across the country or across the world, you need to set up your Google Business Profile account to recognize this fact. From within your Google My Business account, you need to tell Google where you ship products. Go into the “I deliver goods and services to my customers at their location” section and make sure to setup the states and/or countries where you will ships products.. This will stop reviews from across the country (or world) from being flagged by Google.
9. Were there multiple attempts to post the same review?
If a review was flagged and deleted by Google, then the customer adds the same review again – it will be removed again.
10. Did your business recently receive a large number of reviews?
If your Google Business Profile page receives a rapid influx of a large number of reviews in a short time span, the spam detectors may be triggered. If you’ve read our blog post about getting more Google reviews, make sure to only ask a fraction of your customers at a time for a review. If you have a back-log of 500 customers to reach out to, and your Google My Business page gets hammered with 50 new reviews overnight, you’ll sound some alarms.
11. Do many of your reviews originate from the same online location?
If you have a “Leave us a Review” page on your website, and you send all your customers to that page before they leave a review on your Google My Business page, your reviews may not be spontaneous enough. Google likes reviews that appear naturally “in the wild.” It’s likely that Google records the referring URL and sees that all of your reviews are coming from a central hub. A better strategy is to send your clients an email with your Google review link. This way, their email will be the referrer.
12. Do you have multiple business locations?
Do you have multiple locations and multiple Google My Business pages? Customers are great! They love your service and products and they want to tell the world about you. They love you so much that they visit the Google Business Profile page for every location your business has in the metro area, eager to leave their review. Unfortunately, if the reviewer left the same review on multiple business locations, the duplicates (or all) will likely be removed.
13. Do you have an abnormally large amount of reviews on your Google Business Profile page?
If your business has way more reviews than other businesses in your industry and city/area, this could be cause for concern. If your business is in rural a town of 1000 people (just a simple example), but you have 4000 business reviews, don’t be shocked when many of them get removed. I’m sure you make amazing sandwiches, but why does the pizza joint only have 8 Google Business Profile reviews?
14. Did the reviewer simply remove their review from your Google Business Profile page?
A reviewer has the ability to remove their reviews at a later date.
15. Does the reviewer have a completely blank Google account?
Fake profiles commonly do not contain a name, photo, or other information. Real accounts are never completely blank. When a business gets tons of reviews from empty accounts, this is a trigger that the reviews were created by bots and are fake or paid.
16. Did the reviewer delete their Google account?
A user must have a Google account to leave a Google Business Profile review. When a Google account is deleted, the associated reviews are deleted as well. As with a user deleting their review, a user deleting their Google account is one of the most common conclusions we come to when monitoring Google reviews for clients.
17. Have you been active on Google My Business lately?
If you have not been active on Google Business Profile in a 6-month span, it’s possible that your business has been unverified. Make sure to pay attention to your Google My Business page on a regular basis. It doesn’t take a lot to stay active on Google Business Profile. If nothing else, install the Google Business Profile app (Android, iPhone) and reply to reviews and thank people when they leave a review of your business.
18. Do all of your reviews look and sound the same?
If all of your reviews are written from accounts with profile images, and all reviews use perfect grammar, perfect capitalization, and all mention your business by name – there’s a very good chance the spam alarms are going to go off. This is a problem I see frequently – and was the problem for the client I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Some business owners are TOO good at coaching their customers on leaving a review for their business – This is what happened with my client. Ask for a Google review, but don’t over-coach your customers how to leave a review and never offer a pre-made review or a pre-made template for them to copy.
19. Was the review written in third person?
A reviewer is only allowed to review their own experience with your business. Reviews are not allowed to retell the experience of a friend, family member, or a story they read elsewhere. Only first-person accounts are allowed in reviews. The reviewer cannot leave a review on behalf of another person.
20. Was the review “clean?”
Profanity, hate speech, offensive language and personal attacks are not allowed in reviews. This type of content will definitely trigger the filters and the review will be removed. If there are reviews on your Google My Business page that contains any of this type of language, you should request to have the Google review removed ASAP.
21. Are you offering incentives for customers to leave reviews?
Do not offer discounts, coupons or free products to entice customers to leave you a review. If Google notices, you may lose all of your reviews. When you offer an incentive, you are more likely to receive a positive review, incorrectly skewing the results. Do not offer incentives for reviews.
22. Are there multiple businesses located at the same address as your business?
It’s not uncommon that one person may operate multiple businesses from the same address, however, Google sees this as a red flag – especially if you own multiple businesses that are in closely related industries. If your businesses are both real registered businesses, you can try to get help from Google by scrolling all the way to the bottom of your Google Business Profile dashboard and clicking the “Help” link. If nothing else, you may want to use a suite number for each business, so they appear as separate businesses to Google. NOTE – This may not the best or the correct strategy for your specific business(es).
23. Google had a glitch when updating or backing up software
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.
The “Google Deleted My Reviews” Conspiracy Theories
I want to say upfront – I do not subscribe to a single one of these conspiracy theories. Simply, I get a ton of emails from people claiming to have “proof” Google intentionally targets specific small businesses and deletes their 5-star reviews. Of course, not a single one of these conspiracy theorists have actually shared the proof with me, nor provided a step-by-step tutorial about how they collected their “proof.”
Conspiracy Theories:
Google deletes reviews of businesses who do not use Google Ads to promote their business in Google search. The theory is that Google hopes these businesses will start paying to use Google Ads
Google deletes reviews of the competition of businesses who do use Google Ads to promote their business. As above, the theory is that Google wants to force a small business to use Google Ads
Google deletes reviews of businesses who are in direct competition with an area of their business
Google deletes reviews of businesses who are in competition with their own business partners
Again, I do not believe any of these theories, and not a single person has provided “proof” to back up a fraction of these theories.
Helpful and Trustworthy Reviews
Google aims to provide “recommendations that are helpful and trustworthy.” Google’s spam algorithm helps to ensure they can provide the best information possible. Unfortunately, sometimes real and honest reviews get swept up and disappear – and other times, it seems like it’s nearly impossible to get Google to remove a fake or spam review.
Can I get the Missing Google My Business Reviews Back?
Unfortunately, once Google has removed a review from your Google Business Profile 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! That’s time better spent.
Make a Backup of Your Google Business Profile Reviews
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 Business Profile 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.
The Takeaway
You shouldn’t worry too much if few of your Google Business Profile reviews disappear. Focus on running your business and providing great service and products, then ask happy customers to leave a review of your business. It’s good practice to backup and monitor your reviews, then perform an audit when reviews go missing, but don’t lose any sleep over it. Just go out there and get another great review to replace the one that disappeared. It should be pretty simple – you’re great at what you do! Keep doing it. Let the little stuff take care of itself.