Missing Reviews/ Reviews Disappearing

[obcted]

So I've been following this topic for a while now, here and elsewhere. I understand that google is working on it but this has been going on for a client of mine for about 6 months and we now have some good documentation.

I've read the post here:

Why Are My Google Reviews Not Publishing? - Sterling Sky Inc

If you are a business that is frustrated by Google not publishing your reviews, you are not alone. We are seeing more and more reports of businesses that are

www.sterlingsky.ca

I've submitted a ticket here: Sign in - Google Accounts
and opened a post here: Sign in - Google Accounts
Here's the post: https://support.google.com/business/thread/166543588?hl=en

In short my client tells me 10+ have gone missing Since February 2022. After a while he started having his clients send screenshots because they would tell them they left reviews but they wouldn't show. I have proof of 3 but client is insisting it's many many more.

If I could get at least some of these restored it would go a long way.

Client has 2 offices (Boston MA and Salem MA)

Here are the respective profiles:

Paul R. Moraski - Google Search

&

Paul R. Moraski boston - Google Search

Name	Location	Review Date	Screenshot?
Bryan Dawley	Boston	4/28/22	Yes
Andrew Rich	Salem	2/28/22	Yes
Madeline Delgado	Boston	2/12/22	Yes

@JoyHawkins any tips or tricks aside from what I've done so far? These are all clients of my lawyer clients and they are not posting from his office or anything to trigger an IP issue. I'm at a loss for what to do and client is getting frustrated. Any advice you or anyone in the community has would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Ted

 

[keyserholiday]

Please see this before and after a business that engaged in fake reviews.

 

[keyserholiday]

@keyserholiday @BenFisher @JoyHawkins

This is interesting.

So, I just did some analysis of data in the GMBAlert.com database. Here are some interesting data:

Below is based on the data we tracked between October 18th and October 20th afternoon EST.

- Around 13 business we track lost reviews in these 2 day period. We only track around 100 business now.
- This seem to be happening in different sectors, not restricted to specific one. Some of which we seen includes tourism, restaurants, public places, locaksmiths and so on.
- This is not just a changes in number of review, this is also affecting the rating for some of the business. This means that when the review number changes, the rating also changes. Check specific example of business 1, business 2 and business 3 below.
- We did notice these happening for unmanaged businesses too. These means businesses that have a very low probablity of fake reviews. A good example of this is Googleplex (Google Headquarters), which lost around 400 review end of last month.


Some cases where review number decreased and the rating decreased:
- Business 1:
For this Crate and Barrel lost a one star review and the rating increased. This business did not get any new review in the last week, so we can count that scenario out. This is purely from the changes in review numbers.
You can see the full history of this business here:
See history of this business here: GMB Alerts
GMBAlert.com Screenshot below:

Business 2:
For this locksmith lost 44 five star review in this period and the rating decreased.

See history of this business here: GMB Alerts
GMBAlert.com Screenshot below:

Business 3:
For this Restaurant POS system it lost 1 review and rating went down.
Screenshot:
See history of this business here: https://link.gbpalert.com/demo?placeid= ChIJn1nf4ZqRwokRXUGUTl3_zYY
Screenshot below:

Just FYI. GMBAlert.com is completely open now. So feel free to track businesses there. It is in beta, and free (we havent yet got around restricting users).

@keyserholiday
As mentioned would love to do an experiement. Will reach out.

@BenFisher
The above are some public data. These are good example of business loosing reviews.
Ironically, the most drastic example of business lossing review is their headquarters itself. Googleplex (Google Headquarters) had around 10400 review towards end of last month, now it has 10040. You can see google's data here: GMB Alerts


@JoyHawkins
I see the articles is from Feb. Our data is more recent. These trend is something we notice recently. Not sure if these are due to the same reason.

Here is the business that went from 1221 reviews down to 597. Their rankings didn't change much.

 

[WilliamGMBE]

Here is the business that went from 1221 reviews down to 597. Their rankings didn't change much.

Very interesting. Infact it seems to have gotten better eeh.

Will be good to see if ranking changes in a week or so. For category changes and some other things, have heard it takes a week or so for ranking to reflect the change. Would be great to see here. Great you have benchmarks.

Was curious, what is the tool you are using for grid search?

 

[keyserholiday]

Very interesting. Infact it seems to have gotten better eeh.

Will be good to see if ranking changes in a week or so. For category changes and some other things, have heard it takes a week or so for ranking to reflect the change. Would be great to see here. Great you have benchmarks.

Was curious, what is the tool you are using for grid search?

I will run another report on November 1st. I am using Places Scout for my heat maps.

 

[keyserholiday]

This is interesting. I scanned a business at 9:10 AM PT. The Google Business profile stated that they had 471 reviews, the count was wrong. The real count is 466 reviews. I am not seeing the sweep between 10:00 AM PT and 1:00 PM PT, I see the updated review count well after the reviews were removed.

 

[Marcin Karwowski]

This is interesting. I scanned a business at 9:10 AM PT. The Google Business profile stated that they had 471 reviews, the count was wrong. The real count is 466 reviews. I am not seeing the sweep between 10:00 AM PT and 1:00 PM PT, I see the updated review count well after the reviews were removed.

Hi @keyserholiday
I might ask what are you using to scan these companies and such reports?

 

[keyserholiday]

Hi @keyserholiday
I might ask what are you using to scan these companies and such reports?

I use Places Scout they are the best tool for my spam fighting efforts.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I just checked a business (moving company) that told me a month ago he was buying reviews. He went from 151 (4.1 rating) to 118 (3.9 rating).

Sterling Sky also lost 2 reviews but honestly I'm happy to take a 2 review loss if it means Google is actually catching businesses that are buying reviews.

 

[keyserholiday]

Today's review removal was extremely low. I only saw 3 businesses lose reviews. I expected to see more businesses get hit and lose reviews.

 

[Marcin Karwowski]

@Will_GMBEverywhere Your tool is amazing and extremely helpful

I've turned on monitoring GmbAlert for several companies that I know are buying positive reviews for a year.

One company started on October 13 with 183 5-star reviews.
On October 21, out of 183, they received 51 reviews.

We are probably seeing a really big overclocking of the algorithm to fight unfair opinions. Finally!
Let only honest opinions not get hit by the way.

 

[WilliamGMBE]

@Will_GMBEverywhere Your tool is amazing and extremely helpful

I've turned on monitoring GmbAlert for several companies that I know are buying positive reviews for a year.

One company started on October 13 with 183 5-star reviews.
On October 21, out of 183, they received 51 reviews.

We are probably seeing a really big overclocking of the algorithm to fight unfair opinions. Finally!
Let only honest opinions not get hit by the way.

Thank you for sharing this data. Ya, agree, big changes going on with reviews and rating. Hope a lot of legitimate GMBs are not affected here.

Glad you liked the platform. We are still in beta. A lot of exciting additions coming next couple of weeks here.

 

[Henry LocalClarity]

In order to support multi-location clients, we needed to build processes that identify removed reviews. It's incredibly system intensive, but it provides a record of all removed Google reviews at any scale.

We hope to be putting together some reporting across clients that shows relative spikes in review removal over time. I'll share here when the data is available.

Thanks to everyone here who does some an amazing job of sharing insights.

 

[keyserholiday]

In order to support multi-location clients, we needed to build processes that identify removed reviews. It's incredibly system intensive, but it provides a record of all removed Google reviews at any scale.

We hope to be putting together some reporting across clients that shows relative spikes in review removal over time. I'll share here when the data is available.

Thanks to everyone here who does some an amazing job of sharing insights.

I just cracked the code today and the results can't be shared at all. It would make it easier for review sellers to post fake reviews.

 

[keyserholiday]

Is anybody else seeing more reviews being removed in mass? One of the businesses I am monitoring lost around 200 reviews overnight. This also appears to follow up with negative reviews being pushed out the past day.

 

[IMP]

We haven't seen that kind of volume but have limited clients at that level of reviews but are seeing large % of real client reviews go missing.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I had someone tweet at me this morning that said they just lost 70.

 

[keyserholiday]

We haven't seen that kind of volume but have limited clients at that level of reviews but are seeing large % of real client reviews go missing.

Where the reviews removed in the past 24 hours?

 

[keyserholiday]

I had someone tweet at me this morning that said they just lost 70.

Can you ask them to contact me? I’d love to dig deeper.

 

[keyserholiday]

I had someone tweet at me this morning that said they just lost 70.

It’s unrelated. They lost their reviews during the reinstatement process.

 

[keyserholiday]

I hope this case study by @JoyHawkins will finally end the myth that by having more reviews, you will see increased rankings. This also means that if you lose reviews you won't see decreased rankings. The goal is to get a steady flow of new reviews on a weekly basis.