Google Removed All Anonymous Reviews from GMB Listings with No Warning
-
I just saw that Google is no longer accepting anonymous reviews for businesses, and in fact have REMOVED all current anonymous reviews. This just happened in late May, but I'm pretty surprised there hasn't been any talk about this, it's a pretty big deal.
Before I knew this I called their "specialists" to ask why we lost so many reviews. I specifically asked if Google had changed their review requirements that would result in old reviews being removed. She said no. She's either not well informed or just lied.
https://orthopreneur.com/anonymous-google-reviews-disappeared/
My company just lost 20+ positive reviews. Anyone else hurting from the change and finding solutions?
-
@HammerandHand We lost 5-6 genuine customer reviews. Google has not restored them. Multiple support emails are not helping. We are a financial company, and all the reviews came from real clients. But Google removed them without any notification. How can we stop this or get a copy of the reviews? The Google GMB team will never give specific answers about what the customer reviews have violated from their rules.
-
Thanks for the post Laura,
Here's an interesting article that talks about this topic and how fake reviews tie into the motive
https://blog.reviewinc.com/2018/07/24/fake-reviews-latest-news-you-should-know/ -
Just wanted to update this thread with a little note that I've created a blog post about this very topic, published this afternoon on the Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog/lost-anonymous-google-reviews
-
I totally understand, Laura. It's really dreadful to see your hard-earned reviews just disappear, at the stroke of a pen from Google!
Something I hope will help to think about ... it's consistently found by surveys that well over 1/2 of customers will leave reviews if asked. It's just finding the best way to ask that's the challenge. If your consumer segment is particularly tough, you might want to consider checking out software like GetFiveStars, that will help you systematize review acquisition.
-
Thanks Miriam. After seeing our competitors have suffered the same fate (some worse than us) I have calmed down a bit. I understand the reasoning behind removing old anonymous reviews but to do it without any notice just seems wrong.
It's tough for some businesses - for example we have a small number of clients per year, not thousands like a restaurant or coffee shop - and many of them are incredibly private people. Getting them to write online reviews is difficult. Seeing the ones we were able to get from clients over the years disappearing like that was a bit devastating.
We don't like to bug our clients with requests for reviews but looks like we're going to have to!
-
Hi Pau,
Thanks for contributing to this thread.
I do want to offer a very serious warning against ever buying reviews. Doing so can lead to:
-
Legal action against the brand
-
Public humiliation and irreversible brand damage
-
Removal of local business listings
Purchasing reviews is an act that has the intention of deceiving the public. It's not an honest business practice, and any potential reward will never be worth the risk of lawsuits and loss of the public's trust.
The good news is, good businesses need never purchase reviews. Deliver a quality experience to customers, follow the guidelines of the various platforms as to how you can/can't ask for reviews, and you should be just fine.
-
-
Hi Laura,
I agree with you that there hasn't been a ton of buzz surrounding this. I'd put it down to the fact that when Google makes a decision like this, there's nothing you can really do about it. You can't get the reviews back. What a pain, I know. My suggestions:
-
Be sure you have an active review acquisition strategy in place so that you are continually earning reviews at a moderate pace.
-
Be sure you are earning reviews beyond Google on the other platforms your customers are most likely to use.
These are the best insurance policies I know of in an environment in which Google can make policy changes at the drop of a hat.
-
-
Hi Laura,
as the article says, "There is nothing that business owners can do about the removal of anonymous reviews. This is an update that Google made to its core algorithm. It was not a selective penalty levied against a small number of businesses.".
What you can do about this is ask your clients for reviews if they are satisfied with your service or product, you can also offer an incentive so that more customers are encouraged to leave a review.
Here you can see some interesting articles about it:
If you can't get reviews this way, I suggest the possibility of buying reviews, but be careful with this it can be risky. If you want to do it, do it natural, buy from real people with reputation on Google that live near your business.
But better try to get real reviews from your clients.
Hope that helps, best wishes!
-
Hey there,
I think the best thing you could do now is to have a strategy to ask for a review from your existing clients
and to be honest anonymous review doesn't carry much credibility either.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Mind Boggling GMB Merge Issue
A bit complicated of a situation, and one I have never experienced before. Ill do my best to explain: To start: I operate 10+ GMB listings for a brand with multiple locations. The listings in question are our main brand account, representing our headquarters and largest location, and a smaller sub-brand that represents a unique portion of our business at the same physical location with its own staff, hours, entrance, etc. Both are completely legitimate and have been for years, despite sharing the same physical address (think of a retail store inside a resort). About 2 months ago i opened GMB and the system had automatically merged the 2 listings. They were flagged as duplicated due to the address issue. Ok, fine, no problem. After several chats and a call with GMB verifying they were unique businesses and confirming the issue they agreed to un-merge the listings. Once un-merged, we noticed a strange issue. The organic relevance in both maps and knowledge panel had been transferred from our main brand listing to the sub-brand. When querying anything that would trigger our maps listing or the knowledge panel the sub-brands account was now magically showing, including its landing page, phone number, etc. After countless chats / emails / calls with GMB i finally reached someone who understood the issue. This was escalated to GMBs technical team and they returned with the answer that they had never seen this before. Great. More importantly, they returned with the answer they could not correct the problem OR force the 2 listings back together. At this point, we were receiving a very large call volume to the sub-business that was meant for our main brand. After many back and forth's with Google's team, the recommended solution outside of deal with it, was to essentially change the information on the sub-brand to match the main brand page. The hope being the system would automatically merge them again. A bit crazy, but we didnt have much of a choice. That was 2 months ago. Our sub-brand page, now essentially hi-jacked to look like our main brand, receives close to 200k views a month. Our old main brand page still receives around 30 - 50k month. Clearly this is not ideal. Any recommendations on a solution? Happy to completely lose the sub-brand account, but its ranking and relevance has now become hugely important. My preference would be to merge the 2, but I am unsure if that will negatively impact the ranking. Our original brand account has thousands of reviews, is linked to our YouTube, etc. We would need to remove the sub-brand account that has now taken priority in search and request GMB merge it into the old account.
Reviews and Ratings | | jan_noc0 -
Should Every GMB Page Have it's own email address?
Just spent 2.5 hours on the phone with Google. I created dozens of GMB pages for clients using my email address. Now I am discovering that this is not the right way of doing this. Each business owner should create a GMB account with her own email address. Then I can be added as a manager of that GMB account. Question:
Reviews and Ratings | | aj613
Now that I have dozens of GMB accounts under my email account, is it worth it to create a new email address for each client and associate it with the new email address? I think the best thing would be to have each client do it herself, but I'm not sure it's worth the headache of walking each one through it. What do you think?0 -
Local Listing only Showing out of the Local Market. Have you seen this? What are my options?
I have a client (law firm) who has been dominant locally for years. A few months ago he stopped showing locally when you search in his city, but when you search from other cities, he's still dominant. Here are a couple facts: 1. None of the competition is in his building. 2. He does rank dominant locally if you select "top rated" in Google maps.* *Interestingly enough, his competitors on regular searches have great ratings too so its a bit weird that he shows up in front of them but only when you select top rated. Have you seen this? Any suggestions?
Reviews and Ratings | | mgordon1 -
Paying for Reviews Penalty?
Hello, recently came across a company that has been paying people directly for reviews. I of course do not recommend this and realized the ethical implications and even the lawsuits that can come from this, but does Google have a manual penalty for fake reviews or do they just algorithmically discount ones that raise red flags? I have never really had to worry about this in the past. I know you can flag fake reviews to them on an individual basis, but does anyone have history of knowing specific situations where a company was manually punished for doing this? Just curious and I kind of wanted to give them strong documentation to knock it off. Thanks in advance.
Reviews and Ratings | | jeremyskillings0 -
Rich snippets not showing up in Google
Would anyone know why after adding schema.org markup to a websites products, reviews and ratings why it still isn't showing up in Google SERPs? Does Google pick and choose who's rich snippets get displayed on a random basis or some other criteria?
Reviews and Ratings | | znotes0 -
Want to use Google Business Pages but Spam Reviews are putting me off
Not sure if I am missing something here...I have phoned and asked Google business how they deal with reviews which are potentially fake and damaging to a business reputation, it seems there is very little a small local business can do about them other than report the review with no guarantee of anyone helping ...Has anyone else had this issue as I would really like to use this service to assist with rankings on google? It is hard to convince (and to be honest I don't want to have to convince!) a local business that this is a good service at the same time as informing them they will more than likely have to spend extra time fending off fake reviews...Not seen any good answers anywhere else, ignoring the reviews, adding more positive reviews or replying/managing reviews are not an option. Hope someone can help with this, thanks
Reviews and Ratings | | imoprojects0 -
How can a business turn off the Google+ review feature?
Is there a way to disable the review feature on our Google+ page whilst still retaining the rest of the Google+ features?
Reviews and Ratings | | CostumeD0 -
Google reviews only show up in local results, right?
Two quick questions: 1. google reviews only show up in local results right? 2. If you're 100% e-commerce business with no office location, can you even get a google review? Thanks, Ruben
Reviews and Ratings | | KempRugeLawGroup0