Google Review Removed - Anyone Seeing An Increase In Review Being Removed?

[Tim Colling]

In the past 24 hours, we are seeing a significant increase in reviews being removed from one of our clients. They had 65 reviews yesterday, and today 15 of those have been removed. Fourteen removed reviews were 4- or 5-star reviews, and one was a 1-star.

We wrote a custom app that monitors our clients' Google Business Profiles and notifies us with the details of any reviews that are removed. That app runs every 24 hours, and we're seeing more reviews being removed one at a time but 15 out of 65 is a major escalation.

I can't help but wonder whether someone is targeting these clients with a malicious campaign to remove their favorable reviews.

Does anyone have anything similar happening right now with their clients?

 

[JoyHawkins]

I don't know how widespread it is. I haven't seen any drops from clients of ours yet.

 

[rustybrick]

I see review complaints at Browse the Google Business Profile Community but I suspect there are always complaints about missing reviews in that forum? Missing reviews, in general, is not new. But it being more widespread, like you said, would be.

Keep me posted please.

 

[mblumenthal]

From where I sit, there is no indication that anything has changed.

The large number of reviews removed from this particular location seems to reflect the episodic google assessment of older reviews as the filter works its way through each listing. I am guessing that Google looks at these older listings in order of their perception of review abuses in the category.

As this review "flyby" uses the new filter, a bunch of reviews surpass the threshold needed for takedown. And go poof.

I am quite sure that these reviews are real but false positives where real reviews are ID'd as fake is a real and unpleasant side affect of Google's new review spam filters.

 

[mblumenthal]

Many months I tabulate the total forum complaints about missing reviews.

I just did a mid month check and over halfway through the month there are 113 reports of missing reviews. This is consistent with the past year or so when it has been running 200-250 a month.

 

[keyserholiday]

So are we seeing reviews being removed in masses?

I am unable to corroborate it.

 

[localboss]

Regarding the missing reviews, we can see when a Localboss user has less reviews that the previous visit, which happens occasionally, but we are not seeing any users loose reviews lately.

In case you wonder, we can't identify what specific review was removed (GBP's api doesn't allow to store the review for more than 30 days) but we are thinking of a way to be able to pinpoint a review that was at some point published in the profile.

 

[Lahsa H.]

I'm tracking what's going on with reviews activity for approximately 20 SABs and 35 storefronts. I haven't seen anything strange recently. Sometimes, reviews go missing, but it's been like that for 5-6 months. If we ask Google about the missing reviews, in 90% of cases they help us get them back.