Big Jump in Number of Google Reviews - Why?

[FriarTuck00]

Yesterday, one of my clients brought to my attention that one of their locations had a huge jump in the number of Google Reviews in the last week. I checked on Monday and only saw 9 reviews, which conflicted with what he saw (37 reviews). However this morning, I'm now seeing the same thing my client is seeing. Most of these reviews were 1 and 2 star reviews and some were as old as from 2013.

Have any of you seen Google pulling in old reviews and adjusting your total/average? Any reason why this is happening?

 

[Yan Gilbert]

I have not seen anything announced however that there was some change with reviews that had no associated text (just a star rating). At first they were all removed but they seem to have reappeared again. This happened in the last few days. Perhaps this is associated with that.

 

[FriarTuck00]

I have not seen anything announced however that there was some change with reviews that had no associated text (just a star rating). At first they were all removed but they seem to have reappeared again. This happened in the last few days. Perhaps this is associated with that.

I went back and checked and most of them were reviews with text (only 10 of the 38 are stars-only). I'm just curious what has caused them to show up again. It dropped the clients by almost 2 full stars.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Not sure, it was just something that was noticed a few days back. Usually when stuff like that happens it's either because Google messed something up and reverted, or is preparing for a future change.