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

 

[Bryan Bloom]

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

Thanks @JoyHawkins and @rustybrick !!!

 

[Localius]

Any update on this issue? My clients are facing this issue too. The reviews are there, but the number showing total reviews is incorrect.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Any update on this issue? My clients are facing this issue too. The reviews are there, but the number showing total reviews is incorrect.

Please see the pinned response: Hundreds of business got 5 star reviews removed | Local Reviews

 

[Daniel L]

Is there any further updates since Victoria Kroll's post? Anyone got there reviews back? I'm shocked it's taken this long.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Nothing yet. I'll update this thread when there is.

 

[Daniel L]

@JoyHawkins - Thank you

 

[keyserholiday]

I am seeing signs of review counts getting fixed. I have seen it in two examples.

 

[liftmarketinggroup]

@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.

Interesting article, @GMBapi.com, and good to know you track reviews history. That's a keen feature!

@petercanthropus, GatherUp currently offers the ability to download a CSV or PDF of all reviews AND review responses (the responses can be critically useful when Google restores reviews, yet not responses until you submit evidence of them ). Keep in mind this is *not* a monitor/alert/maintain dropped reviews situation, and it's a point-in-time. For some businesses, it's enough insurance.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Update: I'm starting to see review counts increasing again. Not fully back to what they were, but it's heading in the right direction

 

[keyserholiday]

Update: I'm starting to see review counts increasing again. Not fully back to what they were, but it's heading in the right direction

I am seeing review counts continueing to decrease.

 

[rustybrick]

I am not seeing changes but I am only tracking a few... I do see people in the GBP forums saying they are seeing some return.

 

[Daniel L]

Update: I'm starting to see review counts increasing again. Not fully back to what they were, but it's heading in the right direction

Some are fluctuating for sure. Seems strange that they are slowly increasing the count from a coding point of view.