Does Google remove erroneous reviews without being prompted?

[Nikki Stine]

I notice a couple days ago that one of my clients received a 4-star Google review with the text "Never been." That was all they said. I made a mental note to check back on this and protest it.

It's been two days and I went to check on it this evening and the review is not showing on their GMB profile. If I click the link in the email that notified me about the review, I get an error that says "review not found." This is great because I planned on requesting removal.

Does Google filter out some obviously erroneous reviews on their own??

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Nikki Stine, great question. It's been impossible for me to tell. When a review vanishes without my having flagged it, it's possible (1) someone else flagged it, (2) the reviewer removed it, or (3) the reviewer's behavior is so fishy that Google pulls many of his/her reviews.

I haven't seen any evidence that Google spontaneously removes one-off reviews just because they are bogus, and plenty of evidence that Google just leaves them. The philosophy seems to be that no news is good news.

 

[Nikki Stine]

Thank you for the reply @Phil Rozek. I guess as long as it was removed I should be happy.

 

[Brian.Hastie]

I've seen a few of these on locations I manage and unfortunately even after flagging them they still remain, sometimes a year (or more) later. Thankfully they're largely positive reviews but it's unfortunate that they still remain I'd love to learn how their algorithm detects/decides what stays and what goes when the review explicitly mentions never having interacted with the business.

I've also toyed with responding to the review to see if that would change how Google would handle it but it's been on the backburner.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Reviews do get filtered (removed) automatically but it's generally due to IP address issues or a word they used in the review that the Google nannybot doesn't like. Here is an article I wrote on the common reasons: https://whitespark.ca/blog/google-remove-reviews/

The one you described is not one I've ever seen them automatically filter reviews for.