One of the more popular questions found in the Google Places Help forum is of reviews going missing from the Google Map business listing. I see complaints all the time.
Vanessa from Google went ahead and built out a single post containing a bunch of the FAQs regarding reviews in Google Maps listings. The post can be found on Google Places Help and answers questions on technical issues with the reviews on your listing.
Here is it just in case it changes in the future:
Where did my reviews go?You may have seen reviews suddenly disappear from your listing. A few reasons why that may be the case:
- Reviews from third-party websites are no longer displayed on Google Places listings. Below the reviews by Google users, we may link "Reviews around the web" on third-party sites.
- Reviews are removed from Google Maps because they exhibit spammy behavior. We can't share specifics about what signals we use, but our goal is to provide end-users with high-quality information they can trust and use that info to make informed decisions. We also remove reviews that violate our content policy guidelines. 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 Place pages are authentic, relevant and useful. Here's our reviews posting guidelines and policy: http://goo.gl/LtFCS
- We have data spread across multiple databases, and we bring all that information together to create your local listing. Reviews can sometimes be dropped from Place pages when we're trying to reconcile all that information. As we mentioned at the beginning of this note: This is a known issue, and we are working to make it better.
Occasionally, there is a technical issue that causes Place page reviews to drop from Google Maps for a short period of time (a few days) and then reappear on your listing. This happens every several weeks, when we push out a giant housecleaning update to our listings database. Again, this is a known issue, and we are working to make it better.
How do I know which of the above reasons is affecting my listing?
There's not much you can do to troubleshoot this — it requires a deeper dive into our system's backend.
How do I get them back on my listing?
There's no way currently to quickly, easily and absolutely get your reviews back on to your listing. If we dropped them during a reconciliation process, you'll see them reappear after a few days. Other than that, there's not much our support team can to do to ensure they get reinstated. Fixing this is a priority for us, and we're working on long-term solutions to resolve most of these cases.
Where are my owner responses?
This has been a hot topic in the forum lately. Here's the deal: Google Places allows multiple people to own a listing. So you may have claimed your account, but someone else may have claimed it before you and is still considered an "owner" of the listing. The last person to have updated the listing is considered the main owner, and only responses from that account will appear live on the listing (so, if the other owner updates the account after you had left your response, your responses will be removed from the listing). Here's something you can do to make sure you're the most recent owner: Go into your Places account, click to Edit your listing, don't touch anything, and hit "Submit." That should ping our system, to let us know you're the most recent owner. Now try again to leave a response. If you're still not seeing the option to write a response, start a new thread here in the forum, and provide us the link to your Places listing.
Why are the reviews on my listing not related to my business?
Reviews can sometimes get reassociated to another, similarly related listing. If you're seeing reviews on your listing that are not related to your business, please use our Help Center troubleshooter to get in touch with our team, and we'll work on getting it removed. Here's a link to the troubleshooter:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs
Select: I have verified > Yes > Reviews > My page features false or inappropriate reviews > Fill out the form, hit Submit, and await an e-mail response from our team.
One of the links in "Reviews from around the web" is wrong — it's going to a page of reviews about an unrelated business. How do I get rid of it?
Those links are generated algorithmically, and sometimes we get it wrong. If you see an incorrect link, please use our Help Center troubleshooter to get in touch with our team, and we'll work on getting it removed (note: it takes several weeks to fix). Here's a link to the troubleshooter:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs
Select: I have verified > Yes > Reviews > My page features false or inappropriate reviews > Fill out the form, hit Submit, and await an e-mail response from our team.
Why can't my customer leave a review?
Say your customer tells you that they've gone to your listing, but were unable to submit a review. It's very difficult for us to troubleshoot and investigate secondhand reports. Ask them if they've created an account to review on Google (they should get a prompt when they go to leave the review, and they should be logged in to their own Google account before selecting a reviews nickname). Ask them to try posting a response in a different browser. Ask them to wait a few minutes and try again.
How can I report spammy reviews?
Use the "Report as inappropriate" button next to the review to tell us you think it's spam, and we'll look into it. If you're seeing a large network of spam, too many for you to individually mark each one, start a new thread in the forum. We're looking out for those reports and investigating.
I've reported a review on my listing, but it's still there. Why won't you remove it?
Note that we very rarely remove reviews. You can read our removal guidelines here:
http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187622
But none of these questions address the issue I'm experiencing?
The information above addresses almost all the issues you can experience with reviews on your listing. But we know that sometimes, new bugs can crop up. So if none of the information above applies to you, start a new thread in the Places forum and we'll investigate.
Forum discussion at Google Places Help.
