Coordinated Fake Review Attack - How To Fix Review Bombing

[Stefan Somborac]

I suspect that sometime in the last 12-18 months (roughly), Google really polished an algorithm that detects 1-star review attacks. From the small number of cases I’ve helped in the community forum, my recommendation to wait a few days for the algo to clean up the attack seemed to work.

I went to the forum today to find examples, hoping to confirm that my “wait a few days” approach was all it took. What I found instead was this:

1.) A large number of the review bombing cases in the forum get marked as a duplicate of an existing thread before they get an answer. So, it’s probably hard to get help in the forum for this problem.

2.) There aren’t nearly as many review bombing cases in the forum as I expected.

Maybe I’m right about the algo!

Or maybe users are finding help elsewhere.

Or maybe bad actors have moved on to other tactics.


Hoping to find out:

• Are people seeing 1-star review attacks these days?
• If so, is Google cleaning them up automatically?
• Or, if you’re flagging the reviews in the attack, is Google doing a good job of taking them down?

 

[ElizabethRule]

I have seen the same as you, Stefan. Google typically cleans up clear review attacks within a few days. I have seen them leave a few reviews live after the cleanup, but even those cases seem less frequent on the forum. Patience is key, but I can see why a business owner would want them removed quicker, or better yet, never go live in the first place!

 

[Gabriel]

I've noticed the same thing on my end actually. Had a client hit with about a dozen 1-star reviews in one afternoon a few months back, and Google pulled almost all of them within 48 hours without us even flagging most of them. The couple that slipped through we flagged and they were gone within a day or two after that. So yeah, the automated cleanup seems way better than it used to be — I wouldn't rely on it completely, but it's a huge improvement over a year or two ago.