Matt Earle is an entrepreneur based in Toronto, Canada, and is the President of Reputation.ca, an online reputation management company.
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It’s no exaggeration to say that Google reviews are among the most important reviews a small business can acquire. Google is so prominent that its search results — with associated information boxes and the Local Pack — are the first thing many people see when looking up a business.
Those reviews make a critical first impression, for good or ill.
Part of reputation management and modern marketing, then, is building a positive selection of local reviews through the Google reviews system. Monitoring reviews, disputing fake, defamatory or vulgar reviews, and soliciting positive reviews are all part and parcel of small-business marketing and reputation building.
What do you do, then, if you’ve worked to build more reviews only to find that they don’t show up?
The Reviews Were Likely Flagged
Google has a lot of different policies relating to reviews. The company has policies on what can be written in a review and what can’t, who can write reviews, and whether or not reviews will display. Sometimes, a review is removed outright. Sometimes it’s flagged and hidden from everyone except the person who wrote it, a practice called “shadow banning” the user.
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What leads to flagging and causes a review to be removed or hidden? Usually, it’s a violation of one of Google’s policies. The most common culprits are:
• The reviewer included a link. Google doesn’t want people using reviews as link building, so reviews including URLs can be flagged.
• Google detected a conflict of interest. Writing a review for your own business, having your employees write reviews or having people with personal connections write reviews can get them flagged.
• You’re incentivizing reviews. Google prohibits the use of incentives to encourage reviews, especially financial incentives.
• The same review appears on another site, like Yelp. Google wants original reviews, not copied and pasted reviews from other sites.
• The account leaving the review is fake. Fake reviews (called astroturfing) are a huge problem, so if Google detects that an account is fake, any reviews it has left will be removed.
• The review violates the acceptable content policies by including vulgarity, defamatory statements, spam, explicit content or another kind of prohibited content.
I would venture to say that as much as 90% of the reviews that don’t show up, even though you think they should, are flagged for one of these reasons. Among them, the most common we see are conflicts of interest, fake accounts and copied content. These are all techniques that shady marketing companies (or business owners who don’t know any better) use, and Google can easily detect them.
Problems With Your Profile
If there isn’t a problem with the review itself, there may be problems with your profile. Three specific issues come to mind:
1. You might have an issue with a duplicate profile. Google tries to avoid duplicate profiles for the same business, but sometimes they can slip through the cracks. Common causes include acronyms with and without periods (MTL versus M.T.L., for example) or names with additional content or variation (MTL Hair Salon versus MTL Hairdressers). This can happen for several reasons: One is an older profile that you forgot about when you registered a new one. The other is a deliberate attempt to create a copycat profile. Both can be solved by talking to Google’s support staff and claiming/merging the profiles.
2. Your profile might be too new, so Google pays special attention to vetting your reviews. If you’ve only recently registered a Google Business Profile, chances are you’re still in a probationary period. This sandboxing can last for weeks or months, depending on how active your profile is, and Google will be very hesitant to approve reviews that look sketchy to its algorithmic eyes.
3. Your profile may have slipped out of active status. If you’re trying to resurrect an old business profile, or if you haven’t really used your profile in a while, it’s possible that Google revoked verification to avoid causing problems down the line. Now, when you want to use it, you think it’s still verified. But since it’s not, users can’t leave more reviews. To solve this, all you need to do is reverify your business in most cases.
Removing Roadblocks
Review building is a key part of business reputation management, but there are plenty of problems that can get in the way. Thankfully, at least with Google’s reviews system, they’re all easily solved.
Legitimate reviews typically make it through just fine, as long as you’re sure your profile is active and verified.
Most of the reviews that get flagged are fake or spam, and you don’t want those on your profile anyway.
My advice is simple: Look into specific problems, like an unverified profile or a duplicate business profile, and solve them. Then, don’t sweat it. Focus your efforts on building more positive testimonials with unique content for Google’s review system. Don’t worry about the reviews that are blocked; they weren’t going to do you any good anyway.
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Author: Matthew Earle, Forbes Councils Member
