Google reviews are great – they’re used for many, many years now for the betterment of both companies and users alike.
If you’re running a great company, you can collect testimonials from customers who loved your business. Or if you’re looking for a restaurant in the area for dinner, you can use Google Reviews to find nearby restaurants.
However, there are times when your Google Review may not show. Here’s a few of the main reasons why this would happen.
Why is my Google review not showing? The cause
There are a couple of key reasons why your Google Review may not be showing in the listing. They are;
- Your review is being moderated and checked by the Google team.
- It’s a brand new business than only has a few reviews – Google typically likes 5 to 10 before showing feedback.
- You’ve added a URL (www.website.com) in the review.
- There’s language in the text that has led the Google team to mark the review as spam.
- There’s an issue Google’s end that will be resolved.. eventually!
If you’ve left a review of a local restaurant as we mentioned above, this is one of the most common types of reviews done.
It’s great for helping local businesses if you had a good meal there and maybe you had a particularly helpful waiter, so you chose to leave a review recommending the place.
Awesome, vice versa you may have a terrible time and are leaving a review to warn people about the potential issues.
Next, you come to search the restaurant the next day to see if you had any responses to your review or perhaps want to see if anything has been done about your review. But the review isn’t there…
Well, the main cause for this is going to be google themselves, essentially there is a program which filters reviews and removes them if they go against certain conditions. Most commonly of these is if you have a link within the review.
This is because Google doesn’t want to be held responsible for any malicious links that users post. However, there are a couple of other reasons why Google reviews may go missing.
Self-promotion
This is essentially to stop companies from getting free advertising and there’s a few things that will remove the reviews if Google thinks this is happening.
Firstly ,if the company is offering some sort of benefit to those who are leaving reviews.
If the company for example says that you will get a 20% discount if you leave a review, then your review may be removed at any time if Google finds out. This is against Google’s rules, so the review would be removed.
See Also: What is a Google Subscriber Phone Number?
Secondly, if you work at the company then your review will also be removed. It would be in your interest to write a good review for a company that you work at and therefore may be not be entirely honest.
With how Google accounts work and how integrated they are in both our browsers and our mobile devices, they will likely find out if you have any affiliation with the business.
Plagiarism and general trickery
This is to do with Google essentially finding that the company has been using some way of artificially improving their reviews.
For example, if a small restaurant from America suddenly gets a thousand reviews from the other side of the world, Google will be able to identify this.
This would indicate that the company has likely paid for these reviews rather than them being genuine, so they may be removed for manipulation.
Another sign for Google would be if that review has essentially been copy and pasted. If your review randomly got removed, this may actually be the cause.
Other reasons
There is a fairly large list of these so I’ll list of some of the less common reasons here:
- Multiple reviews to the same business. Google will track the IP address of reviews and remove multiple reviews left from the same PC.
- New account. If the account is new and potentially made just to make a review the review may be removed
- Review bot. A review bot is essentially a bot that’s been leaving reviews on multiple companies and has been removed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are a lot of reason for reviews not appearing. Almost all of them are because of Google trying to remove false reviews.
This can be accidental and they may remove reviews if the system flags you unintentionally, but for the most part this shouldn’t be a problem if you are leaving a genuine review or have seen a genuine review on your business.
Also read: Received Google Verification Code without Requesting it
It’s also worth noting that reviews have occasionally been removed because of an outage on Google’s end where they will essentially have not saved the review. In this case you should have no problem re-doing the review and it should work once again.
