Google Maps actively preventing negative reviews?

[karthiksrivatsan19]

Hi All,

My account is about 15 years old and i have posted several reviews over the years. Lately i have been noticing that my reviews are not getting published - ie not being visible to the public/other accounts. I see a pattern to all the reviews that are facing this fate - they are 1/2 star reviews..Case in point - An Optical shop where i purchased for 15k in March(have all the invoice details ) and i am unable to publish my review there. I tried the below troubleshooting - Submitted the local guides complaint form as well as another one mentioned by @MortenCopenhagen in another post(thank you for that!) but no resolution has been provided till now..been more than a month. So i guess my question is , does google have agreements with some businesses to filter negative reviews? What do others here think?

[MortenCopenhagen]

@karthiksrivatsan19 

This is not a simple question. But let me share the following pointers.

Business owners complain that they are not able to get unwanted (read: negative) reviews removed from their profiles.

Google Maps says they will only take down reviews that violate the Guidelines issues by Google.

An AI system is monitoring all contributions and the system do make mistakes.

I have helped numourous Local Guides with hidden reviews. And in (I guess) 90% of the cases the Local Guided was of the opinion that they know all the guidelines and that none of their reviews violated any guidelines. After close inspection many review guidelines were actually blatantly violated.

The guidelines are complex and not very well documented and explained. So it is not surprising that guidelines get violated. 

Also, keep in mind that the trigger might not be in the review text itself. Try deleting the attached photos and check if your review goes public. If so, try adding the photos back one by one and keep checking. This way you can figure out which photo was the culprit.

Furthermore, the spam filter looks at your overall performance and track record as a local guide. So completely unrelated violations can also cause reviews to be removed from public view or particular or all future reviews from the LG get blocked.

I hope this helps a bit even though I'm unable to give you a definitive answer.

Cheers

Morten 

[karthiksrivatsan19]

Hi @MortenCopenhagen  Apologies for the late reply - i didnt get a mail notification for your reply. However i did get a mail from Local Guides connect that said "Based on the information provided, we are happy to confirm that there are no penalties against your account. Please log in on Connect in order to get full access to the forum and all the benefits of our community." So now that has been ruled out, i would like to address your point about guidelines - my review doesn't contain any capital letters or any words that might trigger a spam alert. Also no photos are attached in my review.

Can you please help with my review getting published(like i mentioned earlier, i have all the invoices/proofs you might need)? It seems only negative reviews are facing this issue and this leads to erosion of trust in Google maps as businesses will not have the accurate rating.

[MortenCopenhagen]

@karthiksrivatsan19 

The form you used is not the one related to hidden contributions.

Your profile is set to restricted. If you want help to spot what could be the cause, you need to change your privacy setting as explained here temporarily. It can also be done from a Desktop computer. Goto Your contributions, then Profile settings, then toggle Restricted profile.

Cheers
Morten