Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Google+ Local And Review Issues
Since the rollout of Google+ Local the complaints about missing reviews have risen dramatically in the forums. The issues that Google have had right along with losing reviews remain much the same and reviews can go missing for many of the same reasons:
– Marked as spam
– They are misplaced by Google briefly or for longer periods
– Users mark their review as private in the transition to PLus
– A listing has dupes and the review gets associated with the other listing
– A rating will show in the review count but not in the review corpus
But apparently something has changed. In conversations in the private forum Google noted the following high level points regarding spam that we could share and that may make life easier for some of you:
– car dealership reviews are usually, but not always, spammy
– Google will only allow one review per person per business
– Copy pasting the same review for multiple locations is also not allowed (Google will delete both instances of the review)
– Putting URLs in reviews will result in the review being marked as spam
© Copyright 2024 - MIKE BLUMENTHAL, ALL RIGHT RESERVED.
Comments
160 Comments
So…great way to get reviews from particularly angry patrons removed, at least when they post on multiple locations.
@Justin
So you suggest “counseling” the angry ones to post the same review multiple times? Send them a special email?
@Mike – great idea! Actually, thinking of companies looking up such instances and reporting anything they find. There are probably some black hat extensions of this policy, too….
Mike,
Can you expound on what it is that singled car dealerships out for “spammy” reviews on G+?
I will be the first to tell you that I love this industry and feel we are often unfairly singled out, but I also know of several “agencies” that are preying on dealerships by using deceptive language like ‘review syndication.’ Any insight I can share would be greatly appreciated as always.
Ryan
@Ryan
I can’t share with you the specifics of why Google thinks that most car dealership reviews are spammy. The details of the conversation were under NDA. I assume though that they have looked at a lot and have solid grounds for their understanding of the situation.
The ones that I have looked appear to be guilty of either the misuse of on site terminals to gather reviews or the use of third parties to post feedback cards as reviews.
I’ve run into this a lot lately. I’ve gotten copies of the reviews my clients’ customers have submitted which I believe were caught in the spam algo. Is there any word on certain KWs (such as irrelevant brand name) raising red flags? e.g. “…They were really fast, they only took a two breaks for Gatorade…”.
I used to be in the car dealership industry and I can safely say that most of the reviews I saw were fake, except of course when they were on DealRater ; ). Another industry I’ve seen that gives car dealers a run for their money when it comes to fake reviews is legal services.
@Jessie
The algo captures a lot more reviews. The specifics of those things that trigger it are not yet totally obvious (other than the above items)….
@Mike,
Thanks… Those are things that we strongly discourage with and I can positively confirm are being sold to dealers as a “solution” for Reputation Management.
As much as I hate to see dealers singled-out, I am glad to see Google is taking steps to curb some of the obvious abuse of G+ Reviews as a platform. Thanks again for such valuable information and for your willingness to share it here.
What do you think Google’s eye on dealers will mean for them? Do you expect to see lots of content removed, blacklisting etc? If that was part of the NDA I understand, but if not I’d really value your insight.
@jesse,
Where was I supposed to send that check? 😉
@Ryan
Clearly Google has identified the industry as a source for low quality reviews and for now the results apparently have been to remove (and continue to remove) a large number of reviews … my own honda dealer went from 80 some down to 14 leaving a preponderance of negative reviews…. yet he persists.
Once Google moves fully to Plus the rules might change as it will be easier for them to enforce their guidelines.
Mike:
From your comments it appears that Google is partially flagging reviews originating from the smb itself, no matter how its done. Is that accurate in general or does it only apply to auto dealers.
I suspect other smb’s of doing the same. In a couple of our businesses we have sporadically offered a lap top for reviews done while customers are there. We’ve also suggested the customers could do them at home.
It seems to me we should no longer offer the option of having the review written on site.
That is fine. I’d just like clarity for our staff.
@Earl
I do not have enough data to categorically say that a review station won’t work. I think that it is more likely to trigger events that might be considered spammy but I don’t think that it in and of itself is the cause…. ie I think it would be ok if the users already had google accounts but creating a ton of google accounts on one machine is probably bad karma.
Mike,
I’m in sync with the spammy reviews being nixed and the dupe reviews being removed and since no one or nothing is perfect, I’ll even cut Google some slack on temporarily losing a review on their massive data center dBms (but) what vexes me to no end is why if all other conditions are met, my clients G+ Local listing can’t successfully accept a legit review? After 3 attempts, I’ve still not been able to rectify this snafu, short of voo-doo ;0)
@Neil
What listing are you having trouble with?
We have had multiple clients attempting to post reviews about our law firm, but none of them appear on the “Google+” page for the firm. They all report that they can see the reviews when they are logged in, but the reviews are not visible to the public. Lame.
@Ron
Am curious, did they have accounts prior to posting?
Did you help them set up the accounts while in your office?
Has your listing lost many reviews to the spam filter in the past?
I would be interested in learning about the details of the situation.
Too funny on the only 1 review per business. I went to provide another review for my local pool supply company and saw that.
Google did allow me to edit the review I made 2 years ago and that’s what I did.
I wanted to add the link here but guess what… the review is not visible on Places+??? I logged into my account and the review is there, hummm…
If you Google – Willow Park Pools – you should see my review on the Places+ page.
First time commenter on this blog. Good stuff. With most of Google’s updates there’s always businesses that receive the short end of the stick. However, Google+ for Busiensses seems to be an advanced form of Facebook biz pages in terms of customer engagement and interaction. I’d be interested to hear someone experience with G+ for Businesses. Best!
@Michael
It is still very early in the Google+ Local process. The current pages are just transplants from Places and most do not yet have full Google+ Business capability that they will have after the merge.
So for now they are just static pages upon which someone can (sometimes) leave a review.
The real measure of the product can not be made until all of the pages have fully been upgraded and we start seeing how Google uses the data.
I would estimate that at least 100 businesses we work with lost reviews right after the change-over to G+ Local. This happened a lot in the past (to the same degree – we’d have hundreds of businesses lose tons of reviews all at once) but they always came back within a month at worst. As of today, we haven’t seen any return.
The patterns I can point out is that most of them are in the insurance industry – has Google marked this industry as spammy too? Also, a great majority of the reviews were “asked for” so it’s likely that the user had only posted that 1 review. Do you think Google is starting to filter reviews if they notice the business has a lot of reviews from users who have only posted 1 review? I hope not because I know a lot of users are willing to leave a review when asked, but they don’t always necessarily plan on going onto Google in the future and reviewing tons of other businesses (thus, just the 1 review).
Asking for reviews is something Google wants businesses to do, right? If so, I would expect that it would undoubtedly result in a lot of profiles with just 1 review attached to them.
@Joy
Google has said to me that a single review reviewer is NOT a reason for a review to be marked as spam. So it is likely some other attribute of the reviews that pushed them under the bus. The algo seems to have been tightened down quite a bit. Whenever that happens Google always throws a few too many babies out with the bath water. At that seems to definitely be the case here.
Uhhhhm; sounds like “on site terminals to gather reviews” might not be a good idea for car dealerships… or any other businesses for that matter. I always thought providing the ability for someone to provide a review (even on-site) was ok for Google, but not ok for Yelp. This kind of thing can be abused, but not every car dealer is a bad apple. Nonetheless, I do understand where Google is coming from.
From my experience and seeing some reviews publish and others not, this looks like a technical glitch which is being wrongly assumed to be a filter. These is too much inconsistency, it needs a fix but first recognition of the problem has to happen.
Just to add to my last response, I’ve managed to get a review which went into this twilight zone status, published. I’d love to know exactly what i did but it involved deleting adding again, tweaking the entry ie removing a fullstop so it was different, drilling down into google plus local sub section to edit from there. I just persevered, got lucky and the review showed eventually and surprisingly, have tried to make happen again but not clear what element pushed it out, anyone else had success when sitting in this non visible status?
Pleased to hear Google is finally catching on to Car Dealerships – they incentivize their sales people to get reviews. Obviously that is open to abuse.
@tony
I think what looks like a technical glitch is a very persnickety and not very well developed length and language algo. I would love to see the before and after wording of the review that you finally got published.
I find it odd that there doesn’t seem to be a problem with bringing in 3rd party reviews (city search, yahoo, insidergages etc) yet they struggle with their own technologies?
Reminds me of my days at Pepsi, as good of a company as they are, if they were only organized, god only knows how much “more” money they could make!
I had 9 high quality reviews: only 2 left on a scraped listing with wrong information. I don’t know at what point you suggest the masses storm the castle. I am way past that point myself. I am no longer directing reviews to Google Places. It is worthless.
@ Mike
I purposely made no material change to the text, just removed a fullstop (maybe added one) to ensure the review was different. Additional Things I’ve also done which may help others frustrated is…
Add more reviews with same profile, this can on occasion push out a previous review, look to get the business with the twilight zone review reviewed by another person/profile, this could get the older review live, use the google plus share option (not sure if this helps on not).
avoiding cut and paste
Also have found testing with a new account has more success than with an existing account ?!
I’d be interested in others who are just as frustrated trying these any of these steps to see how they get on, maybe my sometimes success was a fluke (plus I do feel its sooo inconsistent and getting worse)
Obviously in the real world no reviews are going to succeed if it doesnt happen easily
As mike says there is also potential spam algo problems to further muddy the waters but I’ve definitely seen evidence this is glitching and the amount of feedback of client customers hitting the same pergatory issue where they are just writing a nice review (end user reviews tend to have no spam content from my experience as they talk from the personal level ie “Frank was great today and I would happily recommend…) and just pressing publish, leads me to believe its broken, especially on existing accounts, which is where most of these reviews will be placed
I have been having reviews removed from my google+ listing at the rate of 2 per month for about 4 months. These were not spammy and I am not in the car business. I know that only one reviewer put in 2 reviews (I did 2 jobs for him) but none of the others were duplicated or had any reason to be deleted. All of my reviews were 5 stars (or 3/3). I have also heard from 2 customers that they put up a reviews but they never appeared on my site. Question#1: could a competetor be able to have my reviews flagged? Question #2: How do i get these reviews back. I would never ask a customer to do another review because gOOGLE MESSED UP.
On Thursday, June 2nd I went home with 36 Google reviews (I had 48 when Google + Local launched) and a score of 20. When I came to work Friday morning we had 12 reviews and a score of 0! We are a car dealership and we do ask our customers to leave reviews for us and provide them with the link to our Google+ Local page. We have never published a customers review and do not ask them to do so while in our dealership (i.e. – review kiosk). Why is Google targeting car dealerships for ‘spammy’ reviews? Why did ALL of our good reviews get pulled and none of the negative one? From what I have read in the forums, it also appears that now that Google has “pulled” these reviews I will never get them back. Why do you hate car dealerships Google?
Oops, I meant Thursday August 2nd. Sorry.
Major Disappearing Review “Act” – Now you see `em & now you don`t!~
We had 157 reviews & now Google has removed all but two………………….. so here it is August 6th and I`m really hoping that someone will be able to share some insight as to what is going on here????
We work extremely hard to achieve excellent reviews and its very frustrating to see this…………….
Thank you,
Ken Beam
Marketing Director
Douglas Volkswagen
Summit NJ
@Ken & Steve
Google said: “car dealership reviews are usually, but not always, spammy”. That means that they have data in their hands that indicates wide spread abuse in your industry. While either of you may not have violated review protocols many in your industry have and it has brought the “wrath of god” down upon the lot of you.
1)They clearly want to send a message to the whole industry to stop inappropriate review gathering practices.
2)The reviews may or may not be gone. Google always attempts to refine these broad stroke algos and not penalize real reviewers (they don’t much care about businesses). As the algo gets better trained some might come back.
Thanks for the insight, Mike and we will cross our fingers that they get this sorted out. Ken, sounds like we should talk! 🙂
Hey Mike,
So you`re claiming that this is Google`s most recent answer to this “Review-Issue”???????
Ok ok……….. well let me ask you something……… why now??? What changed with Google in the last week or two that caused this???
One more questioned…….. do you actually work for Google?????
Thanks,
Ken-
@Ken
I am not quite sure what you are asking me.
I am claiming that it is an answer that Google noted that I could share. I am not a Google employee but am in regular contact with them.
As to why now, I assume that you are asking “why me now”. This issue has been going on in the forums for the past few months. I assume that the filter doesn’t hit every listing at the same time. As Google changes the filter, it then works its way through the reviews until it got to your listing.
I am trying to bring Google’s attention to this issue and have communicated to them regularly the problems that this has caused. I have also started consolidating the complaints into a single thread on the forum so that it would be easier for Google to monitor and respond. I would suggest that you add your voice to the chorus.
Not solutions any one of them but perhaps steps in the right direction.
It appears that you are not happy with my response. I would point out that shooting the messenger or impugning his integrity is rarely going to get you points in heaven.
@ Mike – No no……………..lol………………….you`re taking this wrong! I`m very happy with your answer…………. and thank you very much!
@Ken
Ah… you are lucky. I was just getting ready to train the spam filter to better recognize your posts. 🙂
Interesting, but of of no help to my loss of 80% of my google places reviews for no reason. IMO you should not be suggesting that smbs solicit client reviews to google places. I wish that I had not taken that advice.
@standenman
There is a reason. We just can’t be sure what it is.
How are you or your clients worse off now that asked clients for reviews and lost some?
Hi Mike,
Can you please email me directly or call me at 908-522-7300 x118….. as I have a few personal questions???
Thanks Mike,
Ken Beam
Marketing Director
Douglas Auto Group
@ tony & mike
I was able to get a review published for about 30 seconds that previously wasn’t showing. I posted the details on this Google Forum thread.
I noticed that the companies I reviewed over the years that are not currently showing up had the name of the owner or an employee in the review. When you’re signed into your account you can see which of your reviews are posted and which reviews are not. See if they have anything in common … like someones full name. Would love to get your take on this Mike.
Aloha, Bob Sommer
@Bob
There are clearly semantic and language rules that result in the removal reviews. I think that length is also a consideration. I don’t think name and of itself is cause but perhaps in combination with some other factors. Let me know what else you find…
My businesses local page is not showing the most recent positive reviews! The negative review that was left is up there for sure, but nothing positive. Patients have even emailed after they left a review and when I go to the page, nothing is there.
https://plus.google.com/117744431547136353489/about?hl=en
Thanks Mike. I did find a similar issue with a very short review that I wrote. It was removed.
On another note, I just completed a test. I found two of my reviews that were not showing up, and I removed the “Full Name” from the review. In both cases the review showed up immediately. This could be do removing their “full names” from the review or it could be due to me just paying attention to the review by editing and re-uploading it.
It does make sense that Google would not want to see an individual, by name, defaced in a review. And, even though I praised both owners, this could be something Google is paying attention to. I have a feeling there’s something to this. Any additional thoughts? Has anyone else tested this? Are you getting similar results?
I had a review that wasn’t showing and it did have the first name of the owner in it. The name of the business was “Danny Franchino State Farm Insurance” and my review referenced Danny. I have another review that shows fine that references the owner’s name (Linda Buquet) but this business does not have the owner’s name in the title – https://plus.google.com/113358377118440631404/about.
I got my review for Danny to show by re-posting it on my cell phone. So I’m wondering if that could be it? The other times I edited it and tried to get it to show were all on a computer.
Thanks for the link Joy!
(FYI just merged last night with hidden address even though supposedly the merge option is not available for lowly home based business people like me yet. Shhh…)
I wondered about the name thing. I’ve seen missing reviews listed as examples in the Places forum that seemed to excessively repeat the service provider’s name that just looked really fake to me – so made me wonder if name repetition OR how names were used in sentences wouldn’t trip a filter in some cases.
One particular client (a lawyer) is on a review drive and many of his clients are posting to google+ for the first time and their reviews are not showing. This is very sad. I look forward to a fix if google has one in the works.
I look forward to a fix if google has one in the works.
You assume that they think it broken and there is a problem. They coded it this way. Usually Google will admit to technical errors and bugs but in this case, it appears to me that this is just a new spam abatement algo. It may get better trained and throw away less good stuff but it has been doing its thing for several months and the only public word from Google is: The engineers are looking at it.
My guess is if you’re lawyer client is trying to get reviews for his business and his clients are using his full name in the review … this might be causing the filter to trip. It’s hard to describe the services of a lawyer without using his/her name. Then again, using a name in a review may not be an issue at all. Time will tell … and so will a little testing.
That is a bummer for our clients who are posting legitimate reviews that disappear. But that is a fair point Mike.
Can you please share with me again, how/where you removed the owner`s name or company name(?) then reposted it??? This doesn’t seem possible? The customers are writing these reviews about your service so forth and you are telling me that you are able to edit the review the customer wrote and re-posting it?
Or are you talking about something else??? Because to my knowledge when a customer writes a review we DO NOT have the ability to alter it. Unless you are writing the review for the customer??? Please kindly clarify??
Thanks!!!!
@Ken
Either they wrote a review themselves of a business and were rewriting their own review or they were working hand in hand with a reviewer to do so. There is no ability for a listing owner to change a review on their own.
@All
The algo is likely more complex than a single variable…
For example IP address in and of itself is unlikely to trigger the filter but in combination with other variables it is likely to. For example if a particular machine or network is used to create a lot of accounts then the creation of reviews on that machine/network might be suspect.
As to name, it might be one variable in a semantic analysis of the content but not in and of itself. It might occur in the context of an analysis of the sentiment, the repetition of keywords, the length etc that Google had determined were characteristic of spammy reviews.
I think there might be something to the theory about having a person’s name as one of the triggers (I’m sure Mike is right and there isn’t just 1 variable). I just saw this person posting in the forum that this review doesn’t show and it lists a first name a couple times as well…
https://plus.google.com/u/0/100499700251355075851/posts/cavxMaMvKYq
I don’t think using a first name only or a last name only is causing the filter to trigger. It looks like the trigger is tripped if you use a person’s full name. I’ve also seen a lot of reviews where this is not an issue. I just found it kind of odd that when I removed the full names from two of my reviews (and only addressed the person who served me by their first name only), they were both visible on Google almost immediately.
@Mike
I have read many of the comments on this thread and see that alot are having this same issue. I am with a Car Dealership and we had 100 reviews and a week and a half ago, we were left with only 3 bad reviews! Bad ones:-( It was like they took all the good reviews and threw them away…it really stinks. We did ask our customers to write us a review but I didnt think that was wrong? I’m just confused because everyone is saying how horrible it is to ask customers to write one. We ask EVERYONE, they could write a good or bad review we never know until they write it, I dont understand why that would be bad. It appears that now that the customer has to have a Google+ account in order to write a review? Is that correct?
On the other side, I ALWAYS read reviews about places/products before i try/buy and now I dont know if I am reading all the reviews or just the “bad” or “good” ones that Google picked. I have to search harder to find reviews also which stinks because I used to be able to just search the item or place and it would pop up.
Thanks for helping us out on this issue!
TIA,
Kristina
@Kristina
I am curious did you ask and have the clients do the reviews while on your premises?
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