Yet again, local search forums and social channels are teeming with reports that large numbers of Google Business Profile reviews have gone missing. In this particular instance, threads like this one in the Google Business Profile Help Forum from volunteer Product Experts appear to indicate that this latest spate of review loss may be associated with a bug and that Google may be working on fixing it, but I’ve seen no official announcement from the brand as of the time of writing this. (This official response has come out since the writing of this article: https://support.google.com/business/thread/324226897)
It’s a scenario that occurs often enough to be considered a reliable phenomenon of Google’s system, and it causes significant concern for local business owners. Enough concern, I think, to warrant an actionable tutorial on how to defend your reputation amid the uncertainty of Google’s review operations. In today’s column, I’ll cover 6 common review loss FAQs with answers that will empower you to cope with these predictable disruptions of your Google Business Profiles’ review counts and average star ratings.
- How can I tell if my reviews have been lost due to a bug or an intentional penalty?
If you wake up to a dramatic drop in your Google Business Profile (GBP) review count, go to the following platforms to see if others are reporting a similar drop:
I also highly recommend that, if you market one or more local businesses, you follow a variety of local SEOs, reputation management experts, and news sources on social media. This will help you get early warnings that a review sweep appears to be afoot.
If you are very confident that you have not violated any of Google’s Prohibited and Restricted Content Guidelines by engaging in forbidden activities (like reviewing your own company or incentivizing others to do so), and you are seeing a large number of reports of sudden review loss, there is a strong chance your reviews have gone missing due to a bug. Sometimes, Google will publicly confirm this, but often, they don’t. If a bug is the culprit, Google will typically fix it and your reviews will be restored at some point. Any temporary damage to your average star rating should then also recover.
If, however, your lack of acquaintance with the above guidelines has caused you to accidentally engage in prohibited review practices, then there is a strong chance that your reviews have been removed for non-compliance, and you should not expect them to come back. Instead, you should get your review acquisition practices into compliance, going forward, in hopes of minimizing future review loss.
Finally, there are countless cases in which Google simply doesn’t trust that a completely legitimate review is authentic and they may remove it or never let it go live as a result. Keep reading to see how to handle this.
2. What should I do first if I’ve experienced review loss?
Before you take any other action, check the GMB API if you have access, or if not, the review portion of the “dashboard” of your New Merchant Experience to discover if you can still see the reviews that are no longer visible on your live listing. Reports like the one in the above screenshot reveal how reviews are sometimes “filtered” – meaning still visible to you but not to the public. Google uses filters to try to proactively prevent review spam, and these filters not infrequently mistake guideline-compliant reviews for fraud.
Before you take any steps to try to investigate, report, and resolve review loss, I urge you to take screenshots of any missing reviews that you can still see on the back end, and put them in a Google Doc. There are two vital reasons for doing this:
- Your screenshots will help you file an evidence-based case with Google for seeking restoration of your review content.
- If you cannot get Google to restore your reviews, you can repurpose your screenshots as social media and website content so that you have not totally lost the value of this hard-earned customer sentiment.
3. How can I get my missing Google Business Profile reviews back?
It’s not great news to hear, but there are some cases in which you will never get your reviews back, no matter how hard you try. If this is the conclusion you unhappily reach after making every effort to have your lost reviews restored, your only options are to:
- Re-publish any of the lost reviews you documented as new social and website content
- Try to move on by earning new reviews
If your review loss stemmed from a temporary bug, you need only have patience with Google’s engineers and the content should hopefully be restored. While you wait:
- Engage in other reputation-oriented activities, such a sharing some of your best reviews on social media
- Publish new first-party review content on your own website
If, however, your review loss does not appear to stem from a widespread bug, and you’re convinced that your reviews have been removed because Google has falsely suspected them of being spam, here are the steps you should take to open a case:
- Be sure to set the permissions on the Google Doc you’ve created with the review screenshots in it so that anyone you’ve shared the link with can view your document.
- Be sure you’re signed into the Google account that is associated with the GBP that is missing reviews.
- Go to this Google contact form
- Select the relevant business from the dropdown and be absolutely certain to put the words “Missing Reviews” in the field below the dropdown, as seen above. When you click next, you’ll be shown a set of tags like these. In this case “review missing” is our best option:
When you click the next step button you will fill out a variety of fields. Fill them all out fully and be on the lookout for this field, in particular:
In the above field, be sure to include the Google doc link so that the person reviewing your request can see the evidence you’ve gathered, including screenshots of your missing reviews, if possible. Provide a thorough written explanation of why you feel your missing reviews are legitimate and adhere to Google’s guidelines. Be concise, polite and follow instructions provided once you get a response.
These days, turnaround time seems to be about a week to hear back from Google on review reinstatement requests. Hopefully this action on your part will result in some or all of your lost reviews being restored. If Google refuses to restore your reviews, take your documentation to the Google Business Profile Help Community, and ask a Product Expert (PE) to look at your case and judge whether it is fit to be escalated to Google staff. Remember, volunteer PEs have no power to reinstate your reviews, but there are instances in which they can get staff to reconsider your case.
4. Why does Google think my genuine reviews are spam?
Even if your reviews technically comply with Google’s guidelines, the following signals could lead them to conclude that your review content is suspicious, resulting filtering or removal:
- You are getting too many reviews in too short a time frame
- Your reviews are coming from accounts associated with previous instances of review spam
- Your reviews are coming from accounts that exhibit odd patterns, such as a single reviewer writing reviews for 30 car dealerships
- The language of your reviews indicates that they may have been generated by AI, using phrases like “I recently had the pleasure of working with…”
- A review expresses suspicion of the five-star reviews other customers have left (this appears to be a spam marker)
- A review contains photos that look similar to the professional photos published by the business or a manufacturer
Any of the above reasons could cause Google to reject a review as spam.
5. What can I do to convince Google my reviews are legitimate?
Apart from taking the steps I’ve described, above, to file a formal case with Google concerning specific lost reviews, there are review acquisition practices which you can implement to earn sentiment that is deemed more trustworthy and is less likely to be filtered or removed. These include:
- Do everything you can to urge review prospects to include photos or videos of their experiences when reviewing you. Make photo-op spaces on your premises that inspire the public, hang in-store signage warmly inviting customers to include photos/videos in their reviews, have staff suggest to service area business customers that they document projects with before-and-after photos or videos, and be sure your written review requests let patrons know how much you would appreciate them embellishing their reviews with photography or footage.
- Respond to all the reviews you receive as a signal to future reviewers that it is worth their time to write a high-quality review because your business will pay attention to it. Hopefully, instead of receiving lots of slap-dash reviews, your corpus will contain thoughtful sentiment fully describing experiences. As our recent report, Beyond the Stars: How American Consumers Use Reviews to Choose Local Businesses, illustrates, 92% of consumers now believe that review responses are central to providing good customer service, and the presence of your responses could be an indicator to Google that you are having legitimate interactions with real customers of your business in the review portion of your GBPs.
- Pace your review requests sensibly. Earning too many reviews at once is one of the longest-suspected red flags for spam in Google’s system. If a brand you’re marketing is having problems professionally organizing its review acquisition program, take a free trial of GatherUp to help you set a good schedule for review requests.
- Keep earning fresh review content on a regular basis; a pattern I’ve sometimes noticed in Google review takedowns is that there appears to be an age parameter involved, such as Google taking down reviews prior to a certain calendar year. I don’t have a good explanation for this kind of sweep, but if Google has some sort of filter that treats old reviews as less credible, then it’s a good reminder to keep your acquisition programs up-and-running so that new content is always incoming.
6. What else can I do to defend my brand from review insecurity?
Let’s make no bones about it: professional reputation management requires serious investments of time and money on the part of local businesses like yours. The instability of overreliance on Google’s system as the major seat of your online reputation leaves you on shaky ground. It’s genuinely stressful and a waste of resources when sentiment you’ve worked hard to earn either never publishes or suddenly goes missing.
Google-based reviews are extremely powerful. They drive conversions and profits, but bugs and filters mean you shouldn’t be depending solely on your Google Business Profile (or any other third-party review platform) to showcase your company’s reputation online. Instead, diversify your reputation management program to include the following:
- Earn first-party reviews and testimonials via your own website; this gives you maximum control over your reputation.
- Earn third-party reviews on all of the review platforms consulted by your community; this way, if some of your reviews go temporarily or permanently missing on Google, you will still have strong review profiles on other sites.
- Embrace and participate in conversations about your brand on social media and capture public sentiment for resharing on your social profiles and for turning into other forms of media, with permission, such as on-site testimonials.
- Feature the reviews you’ve earned in multimedia. Include them in videos you share socially and on your Google Business Profiles, via Google Updates (posts), and on your own website. Reviews can also be turned into images you upload to your GBPs and posts.
- Don’t make the mistake of thinking handwritten testimonials are old-fashioned. Collect them on your premises, photograph or scan them, and share them online. In an increasingly automated and AI-driven internet world, handwriting looks wonderfully human and trustworthy.
- Remember that formal reviews are not the only reputation assets; unstructured citations of your business via blogs, podcast scripts, video scripts, and other channels capture public sentiment about your brand. Anywhere that consumers or peers are discussing your business online makes up a facet of your overall reputation.
- It isn’t only business owners who are frustrated with the imperfections of Google’s review system; while our survey indicates that 67% of consumers feel Google has the most trustworthy review platform, only 55% believe Google is winning the battle against review spam. Meanwhile, only 31% of consumers trust reviews as much as they do personal recommendations from family and friends. I highly advise a close look at all these numbers and the narrative they create of the necessity of putting new emphasis on the offline components of your reputation management programs. Real-world loyalty initiatives and word-of-mouth referrals take your brand’s reputation out of Google’s hands and put it back in your own. Going forward, smart local businesses will focus equal attention on earning both online and offline consumer sentiment.
Summing Up
Review loss has been part of the Google Business Profile experience since this feature launched. Google is doing vital work when they catch and remove review fraud, but unsophisticated aspects of their system, coupled with inevitable bugs, create an unstable experience for both business owners and consumers whose legitimate reviews are filtered or removed.
Knowing that all brands are in the same boat when it comes to Google-based reviews can relieve some of the stress you may feel when reviews are lost, but implementing best practices for investigating, documenting, and reporting problems will help you take action, instead of simply feeling frustrated.
Beyond this, diversification of your reputation management programs will ensure that you are not overly-reliant on Google’s system and are building up strong proofs of your good name both on and off the web.
