Dental Clients Loses 3 Reviews Overnight

[Ray Litvak]

One my Local SEO clients - a dentist - just lost 3 review stars in Google Maps. I'm not overly concerned because that still leaves him with 164 total reviews and a 4.9 star rating. Still, he works hard to get reviews. My concern is that whatever caused the latest 3 to disappear may affect other reviews. Thoughts?
Thanks in advance for those that respond!
-Ray

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Ray,

You posted in the citations forum and title is about losing citations. But the post seems to be about losing reviews. Just wanted to be sure this is about reviews. If so, I'll change title and move to the reviews forum for you.

 

[Ray Litvak]

Hi Linda,
My bad...
Please re-post under the 'reviews' section.
Thanks!
-Ray

 

[Linda Buquet]

Good deal. Changed both title and forum.

The reason being, we have citation pros watching that forum ready to jump into help.
AND we have review specialists or maybe others with the same problem that will see it in the reviews forum.

There IS something going on with reviews. We don't know if it's a new filter or something buggy yet. Could be unrelated.

Here's one of the threads at the GMB forum. https://www.en.advertisercommunity....en-review-in-one-day-what-happened/m-p/767047

 

[James Watt]

I've been totally slammed the last two weeks and am a little out of the loop for the most recent changes, but in general it's not uncommon to see a few reviews disappear here and there. It's rare I've worked with a business for a while and haven't seen that happen in fact. It's a machine that makes a lot of those judgement calls, so it's no surprise if it makes mistakes sometimes. Here's a partial list of reasons I know of that can get reviews removed:

• Web addresses (URLs) in the comments.
• The person who wrote the review is you, a manager of your page or works for you.
• The reviewer marked the review as private.
• The person wrote the review from the same computer/IP address that you sign into to manage your local listing.
• The person wrote the review from the same IP address or device as another user who left a review. This is common with kiosks or review stations (a dedicated PC or tablet for collecting reviews).
• The person tried to post a review for you several times on different dates (for example: they wrote one Jan 15 and it got filtered so they tried again on Feb 10).
• The person reviewing you has also reviewed multiple other businesses with the same name (if you have several locations and they reviewed all of them). If the reviews aren’t specific & unique to the location, they may be filtered. This can also happen if you have two pages for the same location (duplicate page/s).
• You hired an SEO company to post reviews for you.
• You’re caught offering incentives. It’s okay to let patrons know you appreciate reviews, not OK to bribe for them.
• You moved. Google does not automatically transfer reviews when a business address changes. Contact support if you need your reviews transferred to your new location.
• The reviewer’s account has gone dormant (stopped posting reviews).
• Staff being over-zealous in asking for reviews. The programs look for patterns in reviews. For example – If staff are asking to be named in the review and Fred Nerk is particularly committed to getting mentioned, then a run of reviews containing Fred N or Fred Nerk could get filtered.
• Review/s super short with very few details. On Google, this does not seem to apply retroactively, meaning reviews 2 or 3 years old with nothing but a rating continue to display.
• Reviews which seem as though the reviewer has not personally visited the business.
• The reviewer deleted their review.

Given the number of reviews you have, I wouldn't worry about 3 disappearing. Sometimes you can check a cached version of the profile and see if you can see which reviews were deleted. It'd be a fair hassle and probably not worth it, but you could see who's reviews disappeared and potentially ask them to leave a review on another site instead if they have a good current relationship with the client. When reviews do get filtered, even if you know whos review was removed, don't ask them to try putting it back up on Google, you're wasting their time. better to ask them to leave one somewhere else instead if you decide to invest that time.