I wrote a very long (near the maximum length) and negative review about a gym I’ve recently had some problems with. I felt obliged to warn others. Over a week ago I received an email from Google confirming that it had been published. However, if I’m not logged into my google account I do not see the review. Once logged in, I do see it. Others I’ve asked to check it cannot see it. Thanks for any help.
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Hi @Eric_Magoo ,
Thanks for reaching out and asking about the status of your review on Google Maps.
I would advise you to wait a couple of days to see your review publicly, as sometimes it takes a while until it shows up depending on the time needed for synchronization of the information on your Google Maps profile.
Only as a reference, I would like to let you know that the business owners can flag reviews on Google Maps as inappropriate if they consider the information about their business is not relevant. Check also the prohibited and restricted content guidelines.
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Hello @Eric_Magoo
Your review may not be showing publicly if you have included any of this: an email address, a URL or dollar or pound signs, or maybe another icon or symbol or special characters “&” “@” “( )” etc. Please check your review and remove it and let’s see if it publish; otherwise any or some of the words you used are violating the rules.
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Thank you for your quick response!
I first submitted the review over two weeks ago. Might it take longer than that to appear? Also, I did receive the notification from Google 10 days ago that it had been published. Does that not mean it’s viewable to the public? One last question: if it was flagged by the business owner wouldn’t Google notify me of this?
Cheers.
Thanks. I likely used (). I’ll try removing them.
Hi @Eric_Magoo ,
One other likely reason could be that the business owner read your review and was so unhappy that he/she decided to flag it as spam/unreasonable. Maybe @KatyaL could check this and advise what our options are if this is the case.
Cheers
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Thank you, @MortenCopenhagen . In retrospect, I believe this is likely what has happened. I’m surprised, though, that Google would not notify the reviewer of this so he’s not left wondering. Should I to ask @KatyaL directly?
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Hi @Eric_Magoo
I hope @KatyaL will return with an update to her first answer. She gets a notification each time we mention her. So you don’t need to do anything more for now.
Cheers.
Thanks again @MortenCopenhagen
Hi @MortenCopenhagen and @Eric_Magoo ,
Thanks for tagging me and sorry for not being able to answer quicker.
Please keep in mind that some of your reviews could be marked as private.
In addition to what I mentioned earlier, please keep in mind also that Google uses automated spam detection measures to remove reviews that are probably spam. Although legitimate reviews are sometimes inappropriately removed, these spam prevention measures help improve people’s experiences on Google by ensuring that the reviews they see are authentic, relevant, and useful.
For further inquiries related to the Google My Business platform, please reach to their help center.
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I don’t know how to help you any better. You could check if your number of reviews differs between your public and private stats. You could also try chopping your review into smaller parts to test what part/s trickers the spam filter.
Cheers
@MortenCopenhagen @KatyaL I’ve got to say I’m disappointed. This blackbox approach Google takes doesn’t make much sense. A simple notification to the reviewer indicating what the issue is would surely improve this system. My immediate reaction is that Google wants to promote positive reviews and hide negative ones. I spent a lot of time writing a well thought out and honest review hoping to help others from being taken advantage of. It’s bizarre to me that I have no idea why it’s not visible to the public.
As a first-timer on this forum, I much appreciate the community that is so quick and helpful. Thanks again. But honestly, the set-up of the entire discussion board is primitive. The first time I came here I was completely lost. I feel lost whenever I come back to it to check for replies. It’s just awful.
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If it was acceptable to tag all the google moderators I would have done so here. @MortenSI may be you will share this thread with your colleagues.
Hi @Eric_Magoo
I understand your frustration. I felt the same in the beginning. One example : on this board there is a Helpdesk but that is not where you ask your question… Not very logical.
Your point about the need for proper and clear communication from Google Maps deserves so much more attention. If it was given priority this could be fixed quickly. A very similar problem is the lack of usable feedback on edits. It is completely incomprehensible that local guides have to guess about why their edits become pending or rejected.
Google maps need to make some serious improvements on this.
Moderators, please reply to this issue with some usable suggestion on what we as local guides could do to facilitate such improvements .
Please no canned and copy pasted replys about posting in Idea Exchange. That we do know about already. We would like to see some honest and real replies relating your understanding of this issue and thoughts on how to move forward. Or please have some of the relevant developers or leaders step in to this discussion and help us out.
Cheers and thanks
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@MortenCopenhagen I couldn’t have put this any better. I hope your advice isn’t ignored!
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Dear @MortenCopenhagen and @Eric_Magoo ,
There have to be grounds for removal (made private) of reviews and business owners that are in members of GMB program (aka claimed businesses) do not have the power to remove reviews, only Google does. Particularly when we are talking about negative reviews, it would be a conflict of interest to give a business that much power.
I can give you a gazillion links on the GMB forum of furious business owners complaining that Google does not remove certain reviews under their listing and a gazillion links from angry people that their honest review was taken down.
There are a few things going on that affect us.
First of all, there is a capacity issue.
With the huge numbers of user contributions and businesses involved, Google has to work with automated systems. It would therefore not be far-fetched to assume that one single flagging may trigger a certain bot to check for things (like the verification process for edits and this bot either decides on leaving or removing the review OR escalates the flag report for human verification (Google Agent).
Secondly, we may also assume that a certain number of flaggings (perhaps based on the trust-scores of the people that flag) will automatically remove a review. After all, where there is smoke there is fire. Google’s attitude may be to simply take the review away from the public when multiple people see it fit to report it.
In addition to the flagging, the GMB forum is THE platform where you can report issues and the volunteer Experts can decide to escalate a case for further evaluation by a Googler. Make sure to create your own post, all comments under existing posts are being ignored. There are also loads of posts on the Google Maps user forum, but they simply give canned responses about the policies and spam filters (like here on Connect) and direct people to the GMB forum. Interestingly, I found businesses also complaining that 5-star reviews by real customers had disappeared and it was speculated that things are not going smooth with the spam filters at the moment.
However, one Expert gave a clear answer that the most straight forward way to get your review re-published is to edit your review.
Personally, I think there are indeed issues with the algorithm that is evaluating reviews. Apparently there are lots of triggers that may lead to rejecting a review and the collateral damage seems to be rather high. Some of these triggers can be found on the GMB forum but none of these lists are formal as it would be like Google giving away the key to their own alarm system. The systems (bots) that have been put in place are to prevent abuse and the last thing Google wants is people to know how to bypass their defense systems.
One customer that actually phoned Google about automatically taking down her review, got a response along the lines of “Don’t worry if the company is as bad as you say, there will be other negative reviews coming in.” It perfectly illustrates that Google looks at the bigger picture and cannot afford to micro-manage too much.
Last but not least, I have made another observation. It appears that reviews that make accusations or are stories about incidents (conflicts between business and customer) are more likely to be taken down. The attitude being, that they do not belong on Maps. As if Google is says, go and sort yourselves out in the courtroom but don’t argue in public on our platform.
So perhaps instead of giving too many details, you could simply write: “I had a poor customer service experience. I expressed my discontent with staff and their response was not as I would have expected from a company with their reputation”. The point I am trying to make is, it describes a general experience rather than “they lied”, “they were wrong”, “I was treated badly”. These accusation examples read like objective observations that could lead to slander lawsuits.
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Hi @JeroenM ,
Thanks for your valuable information on this issue.
I have only one question left.
After resubmitting an edited review will the count of public reviews be updated immediately or do we need to wait some time to allow for the evaluation and a recount of reviews to take place? If yes how long should we wait?
All the best
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You are really asking the wrong guy. I couldn’t care less about points. 
What we all know is that the various servers and bots that are involved with keeping count are not always working as one would expect (read: get stuck) and the syncing between different systems takes (sometimes a lot of) time.
So, my guess is that you may have to wait for some time. The problem with this is that the count is not transparent so it is almost impossible to check.
The bots we have been talking about can take a fresh review down 48 hours after you published it. The ones that get flagged could be taken down months later. How to say that when you edit this review acknowledged as set to “private” gets indeed re-published and shortly after the points were added, another one of your reviews was taken down? Unless you have a real-time overview of ALL your reviews, it is rather clouded with uncertainties in my honest opinion. For me, another reason to feel happy that I don’t care and thus don’t waste any energy on it 
@JeroenM , I meant the count of public reviews so one can learn if this or that edit to a review made it go public. I’m not concerned about the points but the learning of what triggers the algorithm to make a review private.
There is a big difference between waiting for days or getting instant feedback.
Cheers
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I did some testing and I can now confirm the following regarding the speed at which Google Maps lets us know if a review is public or private. It is instantly. The public count of reviews is calculated correctly every time you reload your profile in an incognito window. So there is no need to wait for sync or cache when you want to see if an edit you did to a review increased your public count of reviews.
That is good news. Currently, I have only one out of 529 reviews marked private.
I also removed all my “star-only-reviews” to zero. The count of these “ratings” are also visible immediately with no delay from sync or cache. But please be aware that you need to select “Your constitutions” from the menu to see the latest count.
Cheers
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Thank you for further investigating this @MortenCopenhagen .
Good stuff.