Hundreds of business got 5 star reviews removed

[xavier_colomes]

Hi all!
I guess you all noticed that hundreds of business owners are seeing that they lost between 10 and 50 (all 5 stars reviews) today.
It's clearly a change of the algorithm that impacted businesses from all over the world, and probably related to the push from countries like Italy and the UK to strengthen the fight against fake Reviews.

CMA secures important changes from Google to tackle fake reviews

Google has agreed to make significant changes to its processes for tackling fake reviews – meaning people can have more trust in the reviews they see.

www.gov.uk

Some initial hypothesis would be that they either changed the geoolocation parameters, maybe to make them narrower to the business location or that they detected a new pattern on the review that triggered it to be considered fake or spam.

I'd love to have. your thoughts on that!

Xavier

 

[Orlando Sydney]

We use a free WP plugin to display review on the website and that holds all reviews indefinitely (since 2017). We've lost a handful of hard won reviews (spam ones are still live lol) but at least have them captured in the back end for the appeals process.

 

[Brian - TGL]

When class action lawsuit I am losing thousands every day it is disabled

You are seeing a big drop in interactions recently you are saying?

 

[Brian - TGL]

We use a free WP plugin to display review on the website and that holds all reviews indefinitely (since 2017). We've lost a handful of hard won reviews (spam ones are still live lol) but at least have them captured in the back end for the appeals process.

Which plugin do you use, and if a customer updates their review from say a 4 star to a 5 star . . . does that get reflected in your plugin, or does it just hold on to the original 4 star review?

 

[Brian - TGL]

As much as I don't like them, Birdeye posts the reviews on their profile. It's a great way to grab proof. I use Yext, and they are supposed to have a tab for removed reviews. I'll DM you my favorite tool.

I would be interested in that tool also if you don't mind sending it.

 

[xavier_colomes]

Latest reports indicate that it could be a bug with the counter, but the reviews haven't been deleted.

I agree @Marcin Karwowski, with the forum overwhelmed it's better to wait. I guess tomorrow (Monday) we'll know more.

 

[silverweb]

I'm seeing people saying that the review number is dropping but the actual number of reviews is still there if you scroll through and count them. I had 85, dropped to 83, woke up this morning to 78 but when I counted the actual reviews, still had 83.

Hey mate, I checked my reviews and found they were down from 134 to 120, but actually, they're at 132. Good catch, mate.

 

[Daniel L]

Is there any update with this guys?

 

[Orlando Sydney]

Is there any update with this guys?

the only update I have is that the review count keeps dropping. Sydney AU geo.

 

[Orlando Sydney]

Which plugin do you use, and if a customer updates their review from say a 4 star to a 5 star . . . does that get reflected in your plugin, or does it just hold on to the original 4 star review?

That's a good question. I don't know as I have experienced that. There's an API ping of some sort that updates daily for new reviews but dunno in your scenario. I'll log in and have a look tomorrow which plugin it is.

 

[Positiveim]

Just reporting this for the records. I have a client that has received new reviews over the last 10 days. Reviews are listed but the review count has dropped 3 times in 4 days. Total should be 46 but has now dropped to 34! Quite distressing for the client.

 

[xavier_colomes]

The two review tools I used didn't capture all of the reviews. I added the location to Yext, and Yext shows they have 621 reviews, while Google shows 582. I audited all 621 reviews Yext found, and none were removed.

To confirm with Localboss data, we just audited our thousands of users and we see the same: the reviews are there, it's the counter from Google glitching.

Hopefully they'll fix it soon.

 

[JoyHawkins]

The only update we have is the one I posted earlier. Google is working on fixing it.

 

[keyserholiday]

Due to all of the questions I have received on this issue and the endless Reddit posts, I wrote about this issue.

 

[Conor Treacy]

Just wanted to chime in that I have a client that lost 80+ reviews. We're just starting his investigation to see what ones dropped.

He's in the House Cleaning business (maids etc) and is in a business group with 10 others. So far, 6 are reporting big drops, but they didn't have any reporting system in place to see what ones dropped off.

 

[keyserholiday]

Just wanted to chime in that I have a client that lost 80+ reviews. We're just starting his investigation to see what ones dropped.

He's in the House Cleaning business (maids etc) and is in a business group with 10 others. So far, 6 are reporting big drops, but they didn't have any reporting system in place to see what ones dropped off.

No reviews were removed; the count is off. Here is my write-up.

 

[keyserholiday]

This bug is impacting message lead notifications for LSA.

 

[JoyHawkins]

This bug is impacting message lead notifications for LSA.

how so Jason?

 

[keyserholiday]

Both issues started at the same time. The problem is connected to the Google tracking number.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Google just posted something official stating it is in fact an issue with counting the reviews: https://support.google.com/business/thread/324226897

 

[GMBapi.com]

I see the imperative need to hire a review software, is there one that alerts when a review disappears? I would really appreciate your recommendations.

Backing up manually is laborious, considering that a GBP can have thousands of reviews.

@petercanthropus & @keyserholiday We (GMBapi.com) have offered deleted review monitoring for a long time (on all your reviews independent of when they were placed) and have a lot of historic data for all deleted reviews of our customers. We published an article on that recently: Why Does Google Delete Your 5-Star Reviews and What to Do

If this is still a very hot topic we might renew the dataset soon-ish and write about ti again.