Hundreds of business got 5 star reviews removed

[localboss]

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

 

[keyserholiday]

Where are people talking about this?

 

[rustybrick]

covered it in a lot more detail at Google Local Reviews Decreasing

 

[keyserholiday]

I looked at some of those threads and can see why Google is removing reviews. For this thread, people are reviewing several of their locations. This thread, the latest review, has a stolen photo with the watermark. Why do people engage in fraudulent review schemes and then play the victim? Google needs to place warnings on these GBPs to alert consumers that a large number of reviews were removed.

 

[Stefan Somborac]

@keyserholiday - ICYMI, Google is showing review fraud warnings on GBPs in the UK!

 

[keyserholiday]

@keyserholiday - ICYMI, Google is showing review fraud warnings on GBPs in the UK!

I saw that. We need those warnings everywhere.