Google Maps Removed 55M Reviews & 3M Fake Business Profiles

[djbaxter]

Google Maps Spam Efforts: Removed 55M Reviews & 3M Fake Business Profiles​

by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable
Feb 19, 2021

Google wrote about some of the efforts it takes towards preventing and removing "fake and fraudulent contributed content" on Google Maps. The numbers of how much Google has removed from the Google Maps ecosystem is pretty amazing.

Here are some of the highlights from the past year, in 2020:

• 55 million policy-violating reviews were blocked or removed
• 3 million fake Business Profiles were removed
• Removed 960,000 reviews and more than 300,000 Business Profiles that were reported to us by Google Maps users.
• 160 million photos were reviewed and removed that violated policies or were of low quality.
• 3.5 million videos were reviewed and removed that violated policies or were of low quality.
• Google disabled more than 610,000 user accounts after detecting and investigating suspicious or policy-violating behavior.
• Google stopped more than 3 million attempts by bad actors to verify Business Profiles on Google that didn’t belong to them.

The crazy part is the 55 million reviews and 3 million business profiles that were removed was less than what was done in 2019. Google said it was "20 million fewer reviews than we removed in 2019 as we saw a drop in the overall number of reviews due to fewer people being out and about during COVID-19."

Read more...

 

[djbaxter]

This was encouraging to read (for me) but just like with forum spam or comment spam or email spam it seems like every time some is removed it is replaced with more almost immediately.

 

[Norbert Z.]

This was encouraging to read (for me) but just like with forum spam or comment spam or email spam it seems like every time some is removed it is replaced with more almost immediately.

You speak well!

 

[Yngwar Malcolm]

This was encouraging to read (for me) but just like with forum spam or comment spam or email spam it seems like every time some is removed it is replaced with more almost immediately.

Inevitable unfortunately. There's demand, there's gonna be supply

 

[chrism]

This was positive news! Hopefully Google will continue to monitor spam.