Dealing with fake negative reviews on Google My Business

I’ve been working with a business who deliver an exceptional service for their clients. It’s a small business and the staff are face to face with individual clients each day (even through most of lockdown) and not only is the technical service they deliver top-notch, but the staff are wonderful with their clients.

As a result of operating like this for many years, their ratings on Google My Business are exceptional – every single review is 5 stars. Even great businesses struggle to maintain a rating like this, but they have.

Until recently however, where someone unrelated to the business decided to post a couple of fake 1 star reviews. Clearly, this is problematic at the best of times, but for a business who has strived to deliver an excellent service, this can be an annoyance. So, they asked me if I could help.

Fortunately, the reviews weren’t particularly damaging – Google sorts reviews by “relevance” and not by the most recently posted, so it’s unlikely many people would have seen them. And even if potential customers do sort the reviews by most recent, the business gets new 5 star reviews regularly, so it’s nothing to worry about.

But, I did want to write up a post about how I approached the situation – it’s not always easy dealing with Google’s support service!

Reporting the review

Had the negative reviews been legitimate, then I would have recommended posting a response but given we knew it was entirely faked, adding any response at this point would just “feed the trolls” and in most situations like this is best not to engage.

The report review option simply flags this review for someone to Google to take a look at. I suspect that this first step in the process goes to a front-line team (potentially new staff) as the response I got back was fairly generic – a simple notification that the review didn’t violate policy.

I half-expected this – having dealt with Google’s support many times, this is fairly common. I imagine they get a pretty high volume of queries each day, many of which don’t require specialist knowledge to resolve, so having a front-line team to filter these out in the first instance makes sense.

I also jumped onto a livechat with a support person but they didn’t really help much other than to advise waiting 7 days for the report to be actioned.

Submitting an appeal

After a few days, the generic response from the report came back and said there’s nothing they can do.

What most people don’t realise is that Google has a support system in place where you can appeal these decisions. This is important. While the first report went into a more generic support system, this one would be escalated to a more specialist team to look at.

If you have any activate reports in your account you can check them out here.

I was more optimistic about this helping out and to be fair, I got a response pretty quickly (within 24 hours) – actually I got two responses (one for each review), but unfortunately both said more or less the same thing – there was no breach of policy.

A difficult situation to judge for Google

While my client and I know the reviews are fake (and can prove it), that information doesn’t appear in the actual reviews, which is all that Google has to work with.

I responded to the support email (which was actually great to be able to discuss it with an actual person) and made the case. It’s still difficult for Google to be able to judge, but here’s how I think Google could have approached it by looking at data points rather than the content of the reviews.

1. Both reviews were posted well out of business hours at the same time. One review would have been innocuous, but two at the same time stand out.
2. While they didn’t say exactly the same thing, they both were aiming at specific areas of the business (so they were topically similar).
3. Both were posted from accounts with no previous reviews.
4. The content of the reviews alluded to underlying issues with the business. Any business where those issues are present, then that manifests itself over time and in multiple reviews. Those issues don’t simply appear on day and are gone the next.

There’s no smoking gun there for Google to work with so I get why they didn’t initially remove the reviews (they don’t get involved in disputes between businesses and customers, which is entirely fair). But, taking a step back and looking at the big picture, it’s not difficult to see that those two reviews really don’t fit in the story that the hundreds of other reviews are telling.

Understanding what constitutes a policy violation

You can read over Google’s review policy here – it’s pretty straightforward.

In this situation, when I responded to the appeal email I made a point of highlighting the policy areas that the reviews violated:

Spam and fake content

Your content should reflect your genuine experience at the location and should not be posted just to manipulate a place’s ratings. Don’t post fake content, don’t post the same content multiple times, and don’t post content for the same place from multiple accounts.

This is an important one because it covers multiple points – the content is fake, it’s posted multiple times, it’s posted from multiple accounts and importantly it’s intended to manipulate the place’s ratings.

Technically, that last rule was probably put in place to stop businesses inflating their own ratings, but that’s a two-way street.

Conflict of interest

Maps user contributed content is most valuable when it is honest and unbiased. Examples of disallowed practices include, but are not limited to: Reviewing your own business, Posting content about a current or former employment experience, Posting content about a competitor to manipulate their ratings.

This is actually a relatively new rule as Google reviews were inundated by former employees reviewing their company, which isn’t what the reviews were intended for.

And now we wait

I’m still waiting for a response to my email, so hopefully that resolve the matter. If it doesn’t there are still a number of different approaches we can take to deal with the reviews, so I’ll post an update then.

Update: There was no resolution of the reviews – Google didn’t have sufficient evidence to remove them, which was disappointing. I advised the client to carefully respond to the reviews with a neutral response (we don’t know who you are, etc), designed to avoid escalation of the situation but also educate real customers and ensure they don’t pay attention to the fake reviews. Not an ideal solution, but it wasn’t long until more real reviews came along.

If you’ve had any experiences dealing with negative or fake reviews, let me know in the comments how you approached them.