Bogus One-Star Google Review?

[Ron Russell]

I have a client who received a very non-specific one star Google review from a person who is not and never has been a client of the business. What is the best way to go about having this review removed?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hey @Ron Russell it depends. Was it a one-star review with no text? Those are extremely difficult to convince Google to remove. Google won't remove it just because you tell them that it was never a client of the business.

The only way Google will remove it is if you can prove that it was part of a review attack or if it's from a spammy reviewer profile.

Look at the review history on the reviewer profile and you can tell pretty quickly if it's a spammy profile.

 

[Ron Russell]

Hey @Ron Russell it depends. Was it a one-star review with no text? Those are extremely difficult to convince Google to remove. Google won't remove it just because you tell them that it was never a client of the business.

The only way Google will remove it is if you can prove that it was part of a review attack or if it's from a spammy reviewer profile.

Look at the review history on the reviewer profile and you can tell pretty quickly if it's a spammy profile.

Colan - thanks for the reply. According to the reviewer profile, this is the only review this user has ever left. They did provide 37 answers and 1 fact check. I googled the reviewer name and found nothing. The same on Facebook...

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Flag the review inside your GMB dashboard and after 3 days you can contact GMB support and make a case to them. But I'm not very optimistic at all that they'll do anything.

 

[Ron Russell]

Colan - thanks for the reply. According to the reviewer profile, this is the only review this user has ever left. They did provide 37 answers and 1 fact check. I googled the reviewer name and found nothing. The same on Facebook...

Also, it was not a blank review. It simply said that not everyone was happy but provided no detail on the complaint.

 

[adammaxum]

flag it..

if you dont hear back, contact/email google support thru your google business listing.

they will eventually manually review and give you their outcome.

at the end of the day, google doesn't usually remove reviews very often. focus on the good ones so that a random negative one doesn't have any impact and is barely noticed.