One or two weeks ago I noticed that the only negative review I have ever left on Google Maps was not visible publicly. When I logged in, the review was still saved on my account and I was able to just press one button to publish it again. A few seconds later, in a private browser tab, I could finally see the review even when logged out.
Every one or two days I noticed that the review again was not visible to the public, so I repeated the process above to make it visible again.
I repeated this maybe 4 or 5 times, and now the review doesn’t ever become visible. I changed the text several times and waited for many hours between changes, but nothing helped to make the review visible to the public. Currently the review is as short as ever, and still it’s not visible. None of the versions I tried to publish contained offensive material.
@AngieYC How can I find out why the review gets hidden?
Please, keep in mind that the trigger might not be in the review text itself. Try deleting the attached photos and check if your review goes public. If so, try adding the photos back one by one and keep checking. This way you can figure out which photo was the culprit.
Furthermore, the spam filter looks at your overall performance and track record as a local guide. So completely unrelated violations can also cause reviews to be removed from public view.
Thanks a lot for your help. I didn’t mean to imply that reviews are removed because they are negative, but I thought that negative reviews are more likely to violate the guidelines. Here is the latest (shortest) version of the review:
Please find some emails from Mr. Polat (the business owner) in the attached image. I’ve never seen such a lack of professionalism.
I only added the image in one of the last review versions, but the issue had already started happening with the versions before which had no attached image. But I followed your suggestion and removed the image again, but still no luck. All the other reviews I left are positive and I couldn’t possibly imagine why any of them should have been flagged, and at least one of them is visible publicly (I didn’t check them all).
You missed the guideline that photos must clearly show the place. Screenshots etc are out if bounds. Share you opinion and experience and dont try to draw general conclusions that can not objectively be drawn from your experience. Be polite and constructive. Your review can still be negative.
As I said, even with the screenshot removed, the review is still not visible. There are reviews from other users who also are just screenshots, and they are still visible. For the rest, that’s exactly what I did: I just shared my experience and didn’t draw general conclusions. Do you think the review I posted above still violates the guidelines? What can I do to understand what exactly is wrong? Is trimming the review until it gets approved the official way? And what if I find out that the problematic bit has nothing wrong at all? Who can I contact so that the review gets manually approved?
It would be very helpful if you would use the tagging tool when replying to someone here on Connect. Type @ followed by the username. Type slowly. Then we get an e-mail notification and you are more likely to get a prompt reply. Just hitting Reply does not ensure we get notified by email.
I already told you this:
Furthermore, the spam filter looks at your overall performance and track record as a local guide. So completely unrelated violations can also cause reviews to be removed from public view.
So your repeated attempts might have resulted in a block.
Study the guidelines and start fixing the other hidden reviews if yours.
Can you tell me more about how completely unrelated violations can cause reviews to be removed from public view? How could yet another review cause some reviews to remain visible, but this one to be hidden?
I’m not sure if I understand correctly, but are you saying that you can see that there is in fact at least one hidden review of mine? Is there a way to find out what reviews are hidden without having to search for them manually in a private browser window? I checked my most recent 6 reviews, which were posted in the last 12 months, and they are all visible to the public. To find them, I sorted the reviews by date and scrolled down until I found mine, but the older the review is, the longer it takes to find it, since all the reviews by the other users in between have to be incrementally loaded.
How can I find out if the repeated attempts really resulted in a block, and how could that block be lifted?
Think of the spam filter this way: The purpose is to block spammers and remove fake reviews. If your actions resemble those of spammers this can trigger the spam filter to block you completely, or maybe you from posting reviews, or block you from posting a review to one particular place. Being a fake reviewer who likely is paid to post fake reviews to a particular pin is likely to keep trying to get his money. So if you keep trying, this can be picked up as spammy behavior. The same is likely the case if you start posting a lot of reviews in a short period. Or post reviews to pins very far away.
This is a screenshot from your public profile. You can see the same using an incognito window.
Locate the number 18 (this is how many reviews you have posted). Then locate the number 14. This is how many of your reviews shown publicly. 18 - 14 means 4 hidden reviews.
Please use the form called Account Investigation for contributions not visible on Google Maps if you believe that some of your contributions have been wrongfully unpublished. Keep in mind, that it takes several weeks for the check to be done, and you will not be notified about the result, so I suggest you check the status of your reviews once a week or so.
I can confirm that my public profile (when viewed in a private browser window without being logged in) says “14 reviews” and that when logged in it says “18 reviews”, but I compared the two and the only difference is that one negative review which I already know is hidden. I manually counted all the reviews listed in my profile when logged in and they are 15 (the 14 ones visible to the public + the hidden one), so right now, without being able to follow your post on how to find the hidden reviews, I have no idea why it says that I have 18 reviews.
Another thing that confused me is that when clicking on “Contribute > Profile Settings > Visualize public profile”, the first listed review is the hidden one. A the top it says “14 reviews”, but again when counting them manually they are 15.
I can confirm that my public profile (when viewed in a private browser window without being logged in) says “14 reviews” and that when logged in it says “18 reviews”, but I compared the two and the only difference is that one negative review which I already know is hidden. I manually counted all the reviews listed in my profile when logged in and they are 15 (the 14 ones visible to the public + the hidden one), so I have no idea why it says that I have 18 reviews.
Another thing that confused me is that when clicking on “Contribute > Profile Settings > Visualize public profile”, the first listed review is the hidden one. A the top it says “14 reviews”, but again when counting them manually they are 15.
I can confirm that my public profile (when viewed in a private browser window without being logged in) says “14 reviews” and that when logged in it says “18 reviews”, but I compared the two and the only difference is that one negative review which I already know is hidden. I manually counted all the reviews listed in my profile when logged in and they are 15 (the 14 ones visible to the public + the hidden one), so right now I have no idea why it says that I have 18 reviews.
Another thing that confused me is that when clicking on “Contribute > Profile Settings > Visualize public profile”, the first listed review is the hidden one. A the top it says “14 reviews”, but again when counting them manually they are 15.
I released one of your similar replies from the spam filter here on Connect. I think it was blocked by mistake.
With only 18 reviews you certainly can count them. This is not so easy when we have added a few hundreds revierws.
I can think of two possible explanations that you can only find 15 reviews in your contribution list while logged in.
The reviews could be removed completely - this rarely happens. And the reviews need to be really bad for this to happen.
The missing 3 reviews could have been posted to businesses that are no longer on Google Maps.
I quickly read your public reviews, and #1 is not really realistic. As your first review is now 6 years old, I think #2 i more likely. Your reviews are very generic and all of them says pretty much the same. Please see my post called 4 Tips on writing better reviews to know how to improve your reviews.
I think we can conclude that you have been banned from posting a review on that pin. Please check if you can post reviews to other pins.
Please use the form called Account Investigation for contributions not visible on Google Maps if you believe that some of your contributions have been wrongfully unpublished. Keep in mind, it takes several weeks for the check to be done, and you will not be notified about the result, so I suggest you check the status of your reviews once a week or so.
Ok, so we can conclude that all my reviews are currently visible, except for the hidden one. So since they are all visible, they seem to be fine from the algorithm’s point of view, and we can say that the hidden one has not been hidden because of other hidden reviews.
What is not realistic about my oldest review, “Nice staff and very good Indian food. Also through Too Good To Go, the Take Away was always very fine.”? I also don’t understand: #2 is more likely… for what?
After realizing that the review has been permanently hidden, I left a review on another place (3 days ago) and that’s the newest review that you can see on my profile. So according to you, I have been banned from posting a review on that pin. And it’s not possible to know why, not even when using that account investigation form? How can I improve my reviews if I’m not told what I did wrong? If my other visible reviews are too generic in your opinion, then the hidden one is certainly the more detailed I’ve ever written, explaining everything that the business owner did wrong.
Ok, so Google will never inform its users exactly what they did wrong because that would make life too easy for the real spammers, but at the cost of frustrating the real users who think are leaving a legitimate review.
Sure, I could add some details to all my other reviews, but that’s still no guarantee that my hidden review will become visible, right?
Is there also no way to know if I have been banned from reviewing a pin? What if a ban was placed by mistake, just like one of my previous posts got deleted by mistake? How can that ban be lifted?
You proved your self that you have been blocked from posting reviews on that pin. No, there is no other way to check this.
Yes, this has been Google’s policy for years. Keep in mind you get a free app. And why should they pay employees to entertain endless discussions with users?
Find another platform to share your negative review and/or move on.
I don’t think I understand. How did I prove myself that I have been blocked? I didn’t get a confirmation neither from you nor from Google. From what I know, the review could just be waiting in a very long queue to be approved.
I’m sorry that you feel this is an endless discussion. I was just trying to understand how this works, and to get some answers that the tool itself doesn’t give. Do you blame me for having doubts about its functioning, if it reads a number of reviews that doesn’t match the actual review count, or if a post on this very forum gets deleted by mistake?
Why was I blocked? I just did what you suggest in your other post about finding hidden reviews: I posted repeatedly until it became visible. Why would you suggest something that gets users blocked?
You tried to add a review and it does not show publicly. That is the test where you prove that you can not post reviews to that particular pin. Google will not explain or notify you about this unless the pin is located inside the EU. There is no long-time pending queue for reviews. If you change a review then it is checked by the spam filter instantly. Waiting does not help you here.
Hoping to get a clear or definite answer as why a review got hidden or why you got blocked from posting a review to a specific pin is the way it works. At most you will get a link to some general guidelines for reviews. And then it is up to you to interpret the guidelines and evaluate your review text. You can always test this by making edits to your text and then submit the review again. If the review goes public (this happens instantly) then you found out.
If this was all the complexity things would be easy. But often it is not something inside the review that triggers the spam filter. Try deleting the attached photos and check if your review goes public. If so, try adding the photos back one by one and keep checking. This way you can figure out which photo was the culprit.
Furthermore, the spam filter looks at your overall performance and track record as a local guide. So completely unrelated violations can also cause reviews to be removed from public view. In your case, I suspect that your repeated attempts to post the review could be the triggering factor. If this is correct you can’t fix it by continuing to edit the text and resubmitting it. That is why I suggest you move on.
Regarding your last question: So were you able to post the review or not? I understand your doubts, but repeated attempts in itself is unlikely to be sufficient to trigger the block. You might have violated other guidelines or the spam filter made a mistake.
You can challenge the hiding of contributions by using the form called Account Investigation for contributions not visible on Google Maps if you believe that some of your contributions have been wrongfully unpublished. Keep in mind, it takes several weeks for the check to be done, and you will not be notified about the result, so I suggest you check the status of your reviews once a week or so.
Ok, thanks for confirming. So EU citizens can get an explanation of why they were banned? And they are still getting the service for free? It sounded like what you said earlier, about Google not giving explanations about their processes in the fight against spammers and this being Google’s policy for years, is the only sustainable way for Google to provide a free app. If that’s not so, why only give this knowledge to EU citizens, other than having to comply to local laws?
Sorry for the misunderstanding: no, I wasn’t able to post the review. At first I kept posting it every couple of days or so, until I noticed that it had been hidden again. Each time, after a couple seconds I confirmed that it was visible when logged out, so from your explanations I understand that this meant that the automatic filter didn’t find any issue with it. This happened over the duration of maybe a week, and eventually the review never became visible again, which lead me to open this topic in the hope that I would find an explanation.
Are you saying that even after several successful attempts to publish the review, long past violations of other guidelines could suddenly cause me to be banned? We already saw that all my other reviews are visible to the public, if we ignore those 3 which until now nobody could say for sure what happened to them, so I don’t see what other guidelines I could have violated, if the repeated attempt to post a review is not a violation.
If all this reasoning is correct, then the only remaining possibility is that it’s a mistake. I already followed that link to request an account investigation. But since I will never get a response as to why I have been banned, and there is no guarantee that I will get unbanned in the first place, do you or anybody else at Google have any additional insight as to why this ban happened, so that I can avoid having future reviews banned for the same reason? Or should I rather ask this again one month from now in case the review is still hidden?
I think others might find this long thread interesting and relevant when they experience problems with hidden reviews.
You wrote:
So EU citizens can get an explanation of why they were banned?
No, this is not correct. They get notifications via email and flags in their contribution lists, and we get access to easily appeal the hiding of some of our contributions. There are rarely any useful explanations given.
Noone can or will explain exactly why you are now blocked from reviewing that place. Maybe in some months the block could be lifted .
You wrote:
Are you saying that even after several successful attempts to publish the review, long past violations of other guidelines could suddenly cause me to be banned.
The term Banned is used incorrectly here. Banned local guides can no longer post content here on Connect, and their LG level will no longer be shown on Maps. Instead of points, only their number of contributions are shown. And all the LG badges are gone. You have been blocked from posting at one particular pin. This is a very mild sanction in my opinion.
Again please forget about finding the exact cause - you will not find it. This is an automated and AI-based system. The system is not designed to give explanations.
Again you are not banned. Yes, wait a few months and check if your review shows up publicly. If not you can try deleting it and try writing another review of the place.
The only thing I have not looked at is your review and any added photos.
