News | February 20, 2014 | 2 Comments

Whether you are writing a review on a Google local page or asking your customers to post one, you may find that the reviews are not published live. Often times, the review will display on that local page when you are logged in, but will vanish when you log out of your Google Plus account.

The main reason this is happening is because Google implemented a filtering system which removes reviews that might be manipulative from the business owner or marketing associate. Google’s main goal is to only display naturally legitimate reviews that a customer posts.

That can be a tough thing to implement, so Google has to resort to a few factors that may even prevent legitimate reviews from showing up. The filtering system will never be perfect, and in some cases your review always stays in their system. The review may end up being displayed a year later if the algorithms take that long to determine that you are a legitimate, regular user.

I once posted a review which was actually a very negative one on a business that I ordered clothes from, which didn’t get published. I checked a few months later and it still wasn’t published. Then about a year later, I logged in and noticed that it was published! Weird..

 Ensure Your Reviews are Published

Listed below is a list of a few reasons why Google might be preventing your review from showing. Simply prevent these reasons and your review should publish live on a business’ Google Local page.

1. Read Google Guidelines– First, just read the Google guidelines on what they openly talk about when removing a review here.

2. Use Legitimate Account– The first suggestion is to just use a legitimate account. This includes using the account just like anyone would. Basically, don’t do what spammers would do and use the account like any person signing up for a Google Account would do.

3. Don’t Write Reviews Under New Accounts– This tip goes off of the above suggestion. Regular users don’t typically sign up for a Google Account to immediately publish reviews to a company page. Well, they do (probably more likely for a negative review), but more often than not, a legitimate user won’t sign up to post one, especially a positive review. It’s not natural.

• A common strategy (which I use myself) is to ask clients to publish a review if they are willing to. I usually send them a link to the Google Local Page and tell them how to create an account if they don’t have one. It depends on the industry you are in, but most likely the people you ask will not have an account so they create one to post the review. Of course, this review doesn’t get posted.
• A new account that doesn’t get used shows no sign of credibility that it is a legitimate person so it doesn’t get published. Some factors to help get it published would be to fill out your profile, include pictures, use Gmail, spend a few hours total log-in time before writing the review, and waiting to publish a review until a week or two or more after creating the account.
• Even if you create an account and immediately write a review that doesn’t get published, you may find that it eventually gets published a few months later after using the account like my situation discussed before.

4. Don’t Publish under Different Accounts with Same IP Addresses– Another huge flag that will likely prevent your review(s) from being published is when your customers log into different Google Accounts from the same location. Google can easily document what computer and IP address each user logs into. If all the reviews have the same IP, that indicates a high probability of manipulation. That just doesn’t happen in the real world.

• I read online about a business owner at a dentist office that set up a computer in the lobby for clients to write reviews and none of them got published. This is a fabulous idea to get reviews and was my idea as well, but it just won’t work. Also, it is against their guidelines set here. It is possible to use proxies so that Google doesn’t see your real IP address but then we have the problem about creating new accounts again. Also, Google might be documenting when all the reviews are unnaturally using the same type of computer which our Google Analytics data even shows.

5. Too Many Reviews in Short Period of Time– Google is more intelligent than many people realize. They look at every possible factor which usually creates legitimate reviews and other general usage of the non-spam nature of users throughout the internet. They take that data to set standards on what their system decides is likely illegitimate. If a business has been listed on Google Local for years without getting many reviews and starts getting a few within the past week, that may be a flag which is a unnatural sign. They can even collect data of the industry the business is in and decide which is considered natural or not. If most of the competitors in your industry have no reviews and you have customers posting 10, maybe 20 +, this can definitely be a bad sign of manipulation. The safest thing to do in not ask 5 more than your competitors have. You might want to ask 1 person every couple months.

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There are a lot of other factors, and some we just will never know about which affect which reviews are publish live and which aren’t. Eventually, I might update this list, but this is just a quick post on some of my thoughts that Google will look at. Make sure you just do everything legitimately and do things naturally.

If you have any suggestions or questions about Google reviews that you want me to look at, please post a comment below.