Why Your Google Reviews Disappear (Ex-Googlers Explain)

So today I brought on two ex Googlers to explain what exactly gets a business flagged and how you can recover fast.

So I want to ask you guys about another topic that comes up very often with small business owners, which is around negative reviews.

I'd love to hear your tips on getting them removed, but I specifically want to know what your insights are around flagging reviews.

There is definitely something I've heard from multiple people that if you get a bunch of people to flag a review, it's more likely to get removed.

And I've heard some people even say that that method is more effective than trying to do it through Google Support, where you flag it in the dashboard, then you submit an appeal after three days that goes to Google Support, which...

I'm now wondering if those appeals are even actually getting reviewed by a human being or if they're just pushing a button and it's all automated.

So I would love to hear your take on this.

Joel, let's start with you.

Yeah.

So I think this was a practice even when I was around.

And so Brad can correct what happens in more modern scenarios.

But the reason that worked to get a review removed, having multiple people flag it is because it created multiple tickets for review.

And so you had 20 people flag it, especially if the flags weren't all at the same time, you would actually create 20 different tickets.

And so the potential to have a human go, yeah, that's against our policies.

I'm removing it now jumped 20 times higher than it was if just one person did it.

It represents the error margin that is expected on a manual review team, right? It's not because you finally found the person that understands the policy correctly.

Like I said before, specifically that team was very focused on the policies and being able to read the review and see if it matched or did not match policy.

And if they couldn't find evidence that it didn't match policy, they would leave it up.

almost their their whole their edict was we leave up as much as possible because in general google it is one that promotes free speech and promotes the ability to express themselves and so the idea that to remove content that someone is freely expressing is a high bar and So the fact that you have multiple people saying this content is bad, it's not that someone, at least in my time, saw a signal that, ooh, 20 people saw this was bad.

It's that it probably actually hit five, six, 10 agents, and one of them actually did it wrong because technically that negative review probably should have been left up.

But that's old information, but that's how it worked back then at some point.