New Thread for Missing Google Reviews - Jade Explains Why Reviews Don't Show

[Linda Buquet]

My fellow Google Top Contributor Kaleh had a great idea and started a thread at the Google and your Business forum to consolidate CUSTOMER complaints about reviews they post not going live. So this is similar to Mike's effort to consolidate business owner review complaints.

But THIS THREAD is for REVIEWERS/CUSTOMERS to post their issues.

So if you have customers complaining they've left reviews that don't show up live - post details in the following thread to get Google's eyes on the problem.

My Google+ Local Business Review is not showing up

There are many reports from customers indicating that the reviews that they have personally posted for local businesses are not showing up on the business page.

I am creating this topic so that customers of local businesses have a place to report that their reviews are not showing up. I would encourage each of you to provide enough information for your specific situation to be evaluated.

It would be great to be able to see a copy of the text of your review so that we have some idea what types of reviews are being filtered. For Google to investigate, it would be helpful for them to know the URL of your profile, as well as the URL of the Google+ Local/Business page that you are trying to leave a review for.

Businesses should continue to post their examples in the following topic:

Reviews from my customers are not showing up on my Google Places listing
Google Groups

JADE JUST REPLIED with some info from the review problem sticky that are worth repeating:

Jade wrote:

Here are some potential reasons reviews might not post, as outlined in this sticky post.

- Duplicate listings of the business. If we've got more than one page representing a business, reviews may live on one but not the other.

- Old reviews. Reviews written before the Google+ Local launch display differently and may be difficult to find. You can upgrade the display of old reviews by trying to write a new review of any place.

- Review sort. The default review sort on a page is by Most Helpful. Your recent review is not necessarily the first one to appear. You can change the sorting of reviews to Most Recent using the drop down menu above the first review.

- URLs in reviews. We don't allow URLs in reviews. If you edit your review to remove the URL, it should post almost immediately.

- Marked as spam. We can't share details about what exactly constitutes as spammy behavior, but the goal is to ensure that users viewing pages see only quality, legitimate information to make informed decisions. We know that sometimes our algorithms may flag and remove legitimate reviews in our effort to combat abuse, but believe that overall, these measures are helping to ensure that the reviews appearing on local Google+ pages are authentic, relevant and useful. Here's our reviews posting guidelines and policy: Removals of Google Places reviews - Places for business Help

So like I said if you have customers complaining they've left reviews that don't show OR if you've experienced the same, post details in that thread to get Google's eyes on the problem.

 

[Linda Buquet]

I did a little experiment. Suggested some review edits to one of the reviewers to see if that would help her review show up. Google Forum Post

I've heard some people say even a minor edit helps the review show up and also thought my specific suggestions could help.

But it looks like it didn't work. Review still does not show up. Which makes me wonder if G is suppressing reviews on the Drs. page itself and not allowing any new reviews to be posted, as opposed to this particular review tripping a filter.

 

[MiriamEllis]

Oooh, bookmarking this, Linda. Good find! I'm sure this will come in handy soon.

 

[Nyagoslav]

Based on Jade's post it turns out there are pretty much two major reasons for review disappearing (not that we didn't know it prior to that):

- There is another listing that Google considers the reviews are meant to be on (this is not necessarily a duplicate of the same business, though, so Jade's statement is not exactly accurate).

- The review was marked as illegitimate for whatever reason.

I don't understand two things here, though:

1) Why if at some point of time reviews have been associated with particular listing and there were no reports for these being for the wrong business, then Google would still want to associate them with another listing. In other words - why when the two databases - the business information one, and the reviews one, were once correctly "stuck" they should get "unstuck" for any reason?

2) How can Google be so confident at saying things like "believe that overall, these measures are helping to ensure that the reviews appearing on local Google+ pages are authentic, relevant and useful"?! How do they measure if a review has correctly or incorrectly been filtered as spam when there are so many complaints of genuine reviews being filtered out? And above all, how can Google assure that everything they do is "helping to ensure" the usefulness of the reviews, when at the same time they ask for "a copy of the text of your review so that we have some idea what types of reviews are being filtered"?

It might be just me, but I honestly don't get it...

 

[JoyHawkins]

It's not just you. I don't get it either. I never thought in 100 years I'd prefer Yelp's filter over Google. At least they show the filtered reviews and are really clear that all filtered reviews are filtered because of X, Y, and Z.