Top Tips On How to Remove Reviews From Google
PeerDive
Consider the last time that you traveled. One of the first things you want to do is figure out where you will stop to get something to eat—being unfamiliar with the area, you need to rely on the recommendation of others. Likely instead of asking random strangers, you will pull out your phone and do a quick Google search for the best restaurants in the area. Rather than just choosing the first restaurant you see, you will more than likely look at the customer reviews to select where you want to eat.
Over 82% of all customers won’t patronize a business until they have read its reviews. Reviews are the internet’s word-of-mouth, influencing potential customers even before they walk into your store. In some cases, you might receive a review that violates Google’s guidelines or is a spam message and want it removed. Don’t worry, we are here to help.
Our experts at PeerDive have put together this fantastic guide on everything you need to know about how to remove a review on Google.
What Types Of Reviews Are Eligible To Be Deleted
Unfortunately, not every review is eligible to be removed from your page. Even if you think it to be untrue, if a customer had a negative experience with your business Google will not remove the request. Instead, Google will only remove the review if it violates one of its policies.
Luckily Google takes its review removal request seriously. Generally, Google will try and categorize the review into its five buckets. Here are a few types of reviews that will quality for deletion:
Quality of Information
This can include topics such as:
- Solicitation
- Advertisement of a separate product or service
- Irrelative information-a review that is not about the business and or was posted by mistake
- Repetitive content
Civil Discourse
This can include topics such as:
- Harassment
- Hate speech
- Personal information: credit card, driver’s license, social security, etc.
- Crude/offensive content
Illegal & Regulated Content
This can include topics such as:
- Child safety
- Terrorist content
- Illegal content
- Restricted content
- Dangerous content
Misinformation
This can include topics such as:
- Profanity-an example could be a customer who uses slurs/offensive language when talking about the business
- Obscenity
- Sexually explicit content
- Violence & gore
- Adult themed content
Deceptive Content
This can include topics such as:
- Fake engagement-a competitor business leaving fake reviews to lower their ranking
- Spam
- Misrepresentation
- Impersonation
- Conflict of interest
How To Delete A Bad Review On Google
To prevent business owners from going in and deleting all negative reviews, Google does not allow its business under to delete reviews on its own. Instead, to remove the review, they either have to report the review to Google, which will then access and see if the review should be taken down, or have the person who wrote the review remove it directly.
To flag a review, you must follow these steps:
- Sign in to your Google My Business account
- In the left-hand navigation, select “Reviews”
- Select the “More” icon (three horizontal dots) next to the review you want to flag
- Select the review you want to flag and click “Flag as inappropriate”
- Click the reason you are flagging the review
- Click “Submit”
Once you have flagged a review, it goes to the Google team for review. This process can take upwards of a week to complete.
What To Do If You Can't Get A Review Removed
As you can imagine, the process is slow, and there is no 100% guarantee that Google will approve your request. Furthermore, even if Google approves your request, it might take significant time before the review is taken down. In the meantime, here are a few things you can do:
Respond To The Review
If the negative review is legitimate, the first thing you want to do as a business owner is respond to the review. Depending on your response, the reviewer might take down the review willingly. After all, a simple apology can go a long way. Remember that whatever you say back to a review will be publicly available. Keep your message polite and understand where the customer is coming from. Still unsure of how to respond to a review? Check out our complete guide on everything you need to know about responding to reviews (both good and bad).
Ask The Customer Directly To Remove The Review
A customer might respond positively to the comment(s) that you made on their review. However, this does not always guarantee that the customer will remove their posted review. In this case, it is best to try and reach out to the customer directly to see if they can remove the review. We recommend always writing them privately (for example, in an email), so the customer won't feel pressured to take action. Be sure to be patient with the customer. It could do more harm than good if you start making demand requests to them.
Tweet to @GoogleSmallBiz To Remove The Review
If all other options have failed, you can always try the method of last resort and reach out directly to them on Twitter. When you have done your due diligence on removing the review, it can't hurt to complain directly to Google in a public matter. If you have screenshots available, attach those to your Twitter message along with a direct link and description of the issue. There is no guarantee that they will get back to you. However, this has worked for some business owners.
Consult PeerDive
Waiting for Google to remove a review from its search engine can be time-consuming and tedious. After all, there is no guarantee that the review will be removed from your page. At PeerDive, we understand the frustration. PeerDive was created exclusively for businesses to leave and view reviews on individuals before offering their products and or services. Users can search PeerDive through our web platform for existing individual profiles filtered down by their full name, email, phone, location, social security, or driver's license number.
Our mission is to make it a little easier for businesses to work in a fair environment where reviews are not just one-sided as they are mainly portrayed on popular review sites such as Yelp and Google Reviews. With Peer Dive, you can learn all you need to know about a client before doing business with them.