Missing reviews after business erroneously marked as a duplicate

[Marcella]

Hi All,
I seem to have hit a wall with GMB support and am wondering if anyone here can help shed some light on the following issue:

I have a client who owns two skydiving centers, Skydive Long Island and Long Island Skydiving Center. My client has owned both of these businesses for years. They are and always have been completely separate business entities (different address, different phone number, different websites, different staff, different booking systems, different EINs, etc.); however, they are located on the same airport.

Last week, my client received a notification from GMB informing him that Skydive Long Island had been marked as a duplicate of Long Island Skydiving Center. I immediately contacted GMB support explaining that the flagging of Skydive Long Island as a duplicate was incorrect. To my surprise, I received a very prompt response acknowledging the issue. The next day, I received a follow up email stating that the Skydive Long Island listing would be reinstated within the next 24-48 hours.

Within 48 hours the GMB profile for Skydive Long Island was in fact reinstated; however, the reviews associated with the listing never reappeared. In fact, it appears that the reviews for Skydive Long Island were transferred to Long Island Skydiving Center as part of the initial erroneous duplicate listing issue.

I followed up with my GMB support rep again to query the missing reviews and the apparent conflation of reviews with Long Island Skydiving Center. The response I received was essentially, "Yes, the reviews for Skydive Long Island are gone and there is nothing we can do about it."

Is this true? Has anyone experienced a similar situation and achieved a more favorable resolution?

I'm inclined to think the GMB rep I'm dealing with is just giving me a canned response. Surely there has to be a way to retrieve these reviews. My client has spent years generating hundreds of reviews for this business and he's just supposed to accept that they're gone? This seems especially egregious to me given that this entire situation was caused by an error on Google's part...

I would greatly appreciate any insights or advice on how best to proceed. Thank you!

Best,
Marcella

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Marcella,

Google should be able to recover the reviews. What I would suggest, since you have exhausted regular GMB support, is to start a thread at the GMB Forum. One of the product experts can look at it there and potentially escalate it for you.

 

[Marcella]

Hi Colan,
Thank you for your response and encouragement!

I will post over at the GMB Forum and see where I get. Thanks again!

 

[jimmydoubleu]

This happened with two of our restaurants at the same location. Listings were merged then separated. Once separated, we noticed listings were cross pollinated with 90% of the reviews on the incorrect page of the other restaurants. Our local rankings tanked and the main, flagship restaurant could not be found within maps and knowledge panel with a simple, proper name search (the other restaurant would pop up). It is our belief that the reviews were quite key to that. We are now on month three of trying to have Google transfer reviews back to the correct listing. They know about it, have escalated to their engineers, and inform you it will take a week to two weeks for the transfer to happen. When it doesn't happen, we have to email them again and they feed us the same one to two weeks line. Five reviews have trickled into the correct listing out of 2,000+.

 

[Marcella]

Hi Jimmy,
I'm so sorry to hear you're dealing with the same issue! It is so frustrating!

I've posted in the GMB forum and seem to be making some headway there thanks to the input of several product experts. I've also continued to work my line of communication with the GMB support team; however, as you noted, they continue to tell me that they're working on escalating it or sending it to another team for review, but I've not seen any actual progress.

I'll continue to fight the fight and see where I get. I'll keep you updated if I have any valuable insights to pass on. Good luck!

 

[jimmydoubleu]

Thank you for touching base. I'm glad you're making some headway. Yes, please keep me posted on progress.

 

[Marcella]

Hi All,
I know it's been a while, but I did want to update this thread and let you know that after 2+ months of daily emails to GMB support, I was eventually successful in recovering *most* of my client's reviews.

For anyone facing a similar issue in the future, I feel I can attribute the positive outcome to two factors:

1. Help from product experts on the GMB forum: they helped me pull together review data showing the original location of the reviews which I then submitted to Google. Luckily, the client was using a review management platform so there was a record of which business profile the reviews originally belonged to.
2. Perseverance: I literally emailed GMB support every day for 2+ months about this issue. I honestly believe this would never have been resolved if I hadn't completely badgered them (I was nice, I promise!).

Moral of the story - don't give up! Hope this will help someone in the future!