Hi, I am starting out writing reviews. I have written 3 reviews but unfortunately none of them can be seen publicly. I turned on timeline history while visiting the locations I reviewed, and have turned on “show posts on my profile”. For one of the reviews, Google indicates that the review is not published and I raised an appeal but it was denied. Not sure why, because it was a legitimate review with no illegal content or even any links or photos. For the other 2 reviews, Google provides no indication about the publication status but having checked on my friend’s account, I can see that the reviews are not published.
What can you recommend?
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Welcome to the community @LilAussieTraveller. I can understand and I am going to tag @ErmesT, as he can explain and solve it much better.
One way to find out your review is public is having your photo uploaded completely to your review. That’s means photos are not showing as “not pending”. This only works if you upload photo to your review. If you don’t have photo to your review, using your review link to incognito mode and checking it can make you know whether review is hidden or public. Please correct me if I am wrong, ErmesT.
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Thank you. None of my reviews have photos.
I tried viewing in Incognito mode but cannot see my reviews.
Then your reviews are hidden for sure. I will tag @Kumaarsantosh also for look into it.
Welcome to this wonderful community. This is like a home for Local Guides.
Request you to please go through the following articles. This will help you immensely.
- Welcome to the new and improved Connect!
- Visit our Community Guidelines page, to know more about our community.
- 5 Core Values of Connect
- A Welcome to Connect Hand
- Introduce Yourself
- While replying to a specific Local Guide (LG) or to mention a specific LG, please use ‘@’ followed by the respective LG user id. You will get this by typing ‘@’, then a list with suggestions appears, e.g. mine is @Kumaarsantosh.
Now, specific to your query, what @Rahul001 has shared about photos is correct but you confirmed that there is no photo attached to your review.
Can you make your profile visible to public first?
Have you created your Google Maps profile recently?
Keep building a well-informed community stronger 
together.
Thanks @Rahul001 for tagging.
JAI HO!!!
@Kumaarsantosh thank you
Yes I did create the email associated with my profile recently, perhaps a few months ago.
I thought my profile was already visible to the public because I have under Settings>Personal content>Profile settings, “show posts on your profile” is toggled on.
Am I doing it correctly or is there another method to make my profile publicly visible?
Many thanks 
I’ve wondered about this as well. My timeline will be on, photo uploaded, and still some of my reviews are hidden. Out of 502 or so reviews, nearly 40 don’t show up on the business pages, some of them are even locations I went to over a dozen times…
Does anyone know what words can flag a review?
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Hi @LilAussieTraveller , can you kindly share a screenshot of your profile?
I am asking because your public profile is showing no contributions, so it’s difficult to try to better address you.
Also the location and the text of the reviews could help
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Dear @ErmesT thanks so much for your reply.
Please see screenshots attached and let me know if you need more info.
As you can see, one review (Su Casa) has been flagged as unpublished - I submitted an appeal for this but it was declined.
For the other two reviews, they have not been flagged as unpublished but in Incognito mode I cannot see them at all.
Thank you
Hi @ChristinaSATX
Unfortunately it’s not so simple.
A review can be made private for a lot of different reasons, and not necessarily for a single word. From your profile we can see that 50 of your reviews are hidden. You can check them by opening this link in incognito mode, and comparing what you see with your public profile.
A review can be made private because the text is not adhering to the rules, or because the filter thing that one of the attached media is not appropriate.
The first step is to remove the media and check if the review became visible. If so, try to add again the media, one by one, to understand what’s triggering the filter.
If it doesn’t work, try editing the text, to remove every possible violation.
If also in this way the review is not posted you can appeal, by using this form: Account investigation for contributions not visible on Google Maps
The check may take up to 2 months.
Do not modify the reviews after the submission of the form
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@ChristinaSATX
You are notified only if the hidden review is related to a place located inside the EU, because required by an European law.
However it’s interesting to see that your appeal was rejected.
Do you mind to:
- share with us the text of the review?
- share with us what you read when you tap on “details”?
- does the review has photos attached?
Interesting, I played around with the last one, and it finally is showing. I cut out a 1/3 of the review and only added 4 media, and it seemed to work. So maybe it could just be too much detail?
@ErmesT is the above information sufficient or do you need any other info from me? Thank you!