Pending Reviews

Google Maps tips & tricks
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It started on a trip to Norway when I posted about a famous place with pictures and then was told the review was not published. Then another review went through and now another two are pending.

I usually improve the text through ai recently so thought maybe google is blocking ai from others but then even a self written review got blocked. Not sure what’s going on. This is new to me and has never happened before.

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Hello @NoonSayNabeel,
what exactly means was told?

  • For places within the European Union, contributions can be marked with a white triangle. It means, they were rejected by the SPAM filter and hidden to the public. If you see a photo like this und My Contributions → Photos → By date:
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    Remove this photo from the review and watch, if the text-only review is published. If so, you can try to crop the photo to remove a recognizable face or some letters and try to attach it again. Recently, we saw also cases where cropping just a very little bit did help.
  • If your receive a mail saying “Review could not be published …” usually means the place doesn’t exist any more.

The rules say, the review must reflect our personal experience. Not sure, how the filter reacts, if it was created or just “improved” by AI. If it discovers exact the same phrases on the Internet, it might result in a ban.

If photos or videos are attached to a review and only one is rejected by the filter the entire review and all other attached media will be hidden. Videos can stay in the pending state for more than a day.

Have a look at @MortenCopenhagen’s series of articles How to Get In and Out of Trouble: The Main post for more tips.

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One more thing @NoonSayNabeel:

Only 2,470 of your 2,731 photos and videos are published, i.e. 261 media are hidden. If they were taken with the EU, they show the white triangle as explained above, for places in other regions, they are just hidden, i.e. not published without any notification.

Also only 728 of your 804 reviews are public, i.e. 76 are hidden, possibly because of one or more attached photo or video which was not accepted, but also possible, because AI generated text or other words, the filter didn’t like.

In order to find out, how many hidden contributions you have, open your profile in an anonymous browser session and compare the numbers under Reviews and Photos to those in the list of contributions you get, when you click on your picture:

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Note, not only every single review and photo is checked by the filter. Also your history counts. That means, if several failures were detected in previous contributions, the filter becomes more rigid in the future. This could explain “even a self written review got blocked.”

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Hi @NoonSayNabeel
Inside the EU and in a few other countries when a review isn’t published you are informed. In other countries you are not informed, even if a review is not published.
In fact you have 76 not published reviews. Are you aware of this?

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You can easily checking what’s publicly visible in your profile by opening this link in an incognito window in a web browser.

Back to the review mentioned in your post: a review can be not published for a lot of reasons, that can basically be divided in two types:

  • A “detected” issue in the text of the review
  • A “detected” issue in one of the media attached to the review

Normally clicking on Learn More you can find some more explanation, and usually there is also the possibility to Appeal for an operator to check the review.
If the block is caused by an attached media, you may have to delete it,and to republish the review.

It doesn’t necessarily means that you did something wrong. The filter is very harsh and can make some mistake, that’s why we have the possibility to appeal.
I know, sometimes we do everything well, and it’s difficult to understand “why” a review is not published. Hope this article may help you: Your review has not been published. Do you know why?

The pending status is a totally different story: as the AI is checking the attached media, having many photos or some video attached to a review can make the check very long (my personal record is of 6 days). Do you have medias attached to the pending review?

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