Ultimate Guide to Finding Google Local Reviews that were Filtered/Removed

[Linda Buquet]

Joy Hawkins, fellow Google Top Contributor, friend and forum sponsor - just wrote a dynamite post about how to search for and find reviews that get removed by Google. FYI Google seldom deletes anything - so these reviews are not deleted, but just filtered from view, I believe.

Some of the issues that comes up a lot in the Google Business forum are "why was my review deleted?" or "why are several of my reviews missing?" or "customers are placing new reviews that never show up". So it's helpful for us, as TCs, to know how to search and find filtered reviews to try to help the business owner understand why their reviews were removed.

Sometimes when we find them, it's pretty obvious they were fake reviews, self reviews or incentivized reviews - or there was something else like a link in the review that raised a red flag. At the bottom of the post Joy also does a good job of listing the most common reasons reviews get filtered.

<a href="http://www.joyannehawkins.com/ultimate-guide-finding-filtered-reviews-google-places/">Ultimate Guide to Finding Filtered Reviews on Google Places/Google Plus</a>
(Just a snippet - so click the link to read full post.)

One of the most common questions I run into at the Google & Your Business Forum (Google Places Forum) is people wanting to know why their reviews got filtered. The first step to figuring that out is to track down the reviews and looking for patterns to see why it might have been filtered.

But how can you look at the reviews if they have disappeared from your page? How can you possibly contact the users/customers and ask them to revise the review if you don’t know who they are?

Do not fear, there are still a few ways to track down this information.

So now when a new client asks why their reviews are gone, you have TC tips that will help you search and find missing reviews so you can try to figure out what happened.

Good stuff, eh???

Thanks Joy!

 

[JoyHawkins]

Thanks for the mention Linda! Filtered reviews have been somewhat of a obsession for me. When I stumbled across the "&strip=1" modifier I was super excited and figured it was too good not to share

 

[Jon Hall]

Thanks, Joy! This is a much needed resource. And the &strip=1 tip is golden


I posed a minor methodological question in the comments. Hope you can give a quick response at your convenience.

 

[Linda Buquet]

I have a rather large "methodological question".

I've tried looking at cache for G+ pages before and they are BLANK. I just tried again and it's blank.

So maybe you should explain, when you 1st get to cache it will be blank - but then if you add that string to the end it shows the plain text of the page.

It occurs to me the other place this will come in really handy for me is diagnosing rank drops to see if they previously had a spammy description or different version of the name. Or when they say all I did was make a couple changes and then I dropped, but I don't remember exactly what I changed. I know that trick only provides a really recent peek, but is still helpful at times.

 

[Jon Hall]

when you 1st get to cache it will be blank - but then if you add that string to the end it shows the plain text of the page

This is what worked for me. Just add the &strip=1 param to the end of the cached G+ page URL and refresh

 

[Linda Buquet]

Yep that's what I did too.

Was just saying for others reading, when they get to that 1st step of trying to look at cache page and it just comes up blank - they may stop right there thinking it does not work. So thought she should mention that you'll get a blank page, but it's OK, just add that param on the end then you can see the content.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Thanks for sharing this Joy

This has come in handy on several occasions. Great discovery!