Are You Seeing Google Restore Old Reviews

[JoyHawkins]

Today one of my colleagues mentioned we're getting email notifications for new Google reviews but when she looks at them, they are from months ago. I'm wondering if Google is restoring old reviews? They made an announcement a few weeks ago saying they were going to do this. Are you guys seeing this as well?

 

[dale-jepto]

We have seen this, and it seems to relate to reviews left by Local Guides as discussed here.

This may also affect reporting as the Reviews API does not have any way to sort by the latest reviews.

 

[keyserholiday]

Today one of my colleagues mentioned we're getting email notifications for new Google reviews but when she looks at them, they are from months ago. I'm wondering if Google is restoring old reviews? They made an announcement a few weeks ago saying they were going to do this. Are you guys seeing this as well?

Yes, it started last Friday and a few of the reviews clearly violate the TOS. I posted about it here. On Sunday google released several more reviews in the early morning hours. Google admitted that errored by being too aggressive in filtering out and removing reviews. Google will restore removed Google reviews

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Yep, I've seen two cases of this in the last week now. Old review that must have been filtered now appearing and looking like it's new.

 

[Norbert Z.]

See too.

 

[MeganR]

Same. A client had a spammer's review from 1 month ago, appear 2 days ago. I did note that this spammer has Local Guide status. That seems to comport with what I've read in forums re reinstating local guide reviews which were taken down during the great review purge of 2022.

 

[mattstephenskc]

Today one of my colleagues mentioned we're getting email notifications for new Google reviews but when she looks at them, they are from months ago. I'm wondering if Google is restoring old reviews? They made an announcement a few weeks ago saying they were going to do this. Are you guys seeing this as well?

Yes, we have. The lag time has been 8–10 weeks. Reviews left around New Year's started showing up a couple weeks ago.

 

[Claudia]

I also have seen several reviews when filtering on un-responded in our reputation dashboard. I noticed that several reviews from the previous month had no response. 9 out of 10 were local guides when I looked into it.