Ok finally bit the dust and noticed i had 530 reviews, but in incognito mode shows 521. Decided to do a comprehensive search one by one to find tge hidden reviews. Comparing side by side every single review with normal mode vs incognito mode, they matched 100 percent. This means the private/hidden reviews are not able to be found/corrected. I ran through the entire list twice and every single review showed up in incognito view. Thoughts? This is an issue if you cannot find your hidden reviews or photos???
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I have never heard if this being a problem before.
I have 715 reviews of which 4 are hidden. I could check later today.
But comparing 2 lists manually with this many items is not easy. I remember someone created a spreadsheet method for this.
Which platform did you use?
Hi @StevenBerlin I am facing the same problem; more than 400 reviews of mine are hidden, though all my reviews are genuine. I also had discussion with other Google moderators, but their suggestions are not helping me. Do you find any solution for the above issue of hidden reviews?
I have the same issue. Even though using a semi automated method on the desktop to compare public and private, I was never able to find two hidden reviews. Since itās only two, I donāt care much, but found it strange and suspect a bug in Googleās counting.
@StevenBerlin @MortenCopenhagen @VinayJayaram
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@WilfriedB
@VinayJayaram
@StevenBerlin
@ErmesT
I can now confirm that Google has changed previous practice to include hidden reviews in our review contribution lists when logged in. The hidden review are now nowhere to be found.
This is a radical change that Google in my opinion should have notified us about.
In practice this makes it impossible to find and fix hidden reviews as Google recommends we do.
Furthermore, this change makes it impossible for users to learn from their mistakes - individually and collectively.
But why?
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I hope more people will double check this. Is only the public reviews shown in your review contribution list?
This is weird, and not only! @MortenCopenhagen
The possibility to appeal for not posted content is part of the EU rules, so at least for places inside the EU we MUST be informed.
I cannot check right now, but I will do it for sure later
Thank you for the update
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Thanks Ermes,
4 are missing on my profile. Over the past months I might have received the same number of emails saying a review is being taken down. Just a theory.
We are also discussing semi hidden pics as a new concept in another thread.
I wonder what is going on.
I just wanted to verify, but found something different:
Scrolling down in Contributions on the desktop, it stops after showing 507 reviews, although I should have 660 public and two hidden reviews. āIt stopsā means the circle the bottom keeps rotating, as if the browser were waiting for network response, but I tried several times and it always stops at the same point.
Several months ago, I had the same issue, which was solved after a while.
It might be coincidence, but the last review, I do see, is one which hidden longe ago and I edited many times until it was accepted. I did check it in anonymous window and it still shows.
Then I crosschecked, because kept the permalinks of some of reviews. This one is not among the 507 in my contributions list, but it is public. The same is true for this one.
@MortenCopenhagen @VinayJayaram @StevenBerlin @ErmesT
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@WilfriedB
@VinayJayaram
@StevenBerlin
@ErmesT
Itās unpleasant to see such a change from Google; at least it would have cautioned us in the beginning that your reviews are getting hidden. Out of 2275 reviews, 445 reviews are hidden, which is a huge waste of time for me to update and upload in the Gmap. One thing I also observed here is that hidden reviews are not shown in public; however, hidden reviews photos and videos are shown to the public. Whats the logic behind this? I am surprised.
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The logic behind āhiddenā is that they will not be shown to other users. I think it makes sense.
If your photos uploaded together with reviews are still visible for hidden reviews, you can conclude that it was not the photos that triggered the spam filter. But normally, reviews and the attached photos are evaluated as one unit. So Iām surprised if you see images uploaded to hidden reviews being public under the places. Are you sure about this?
@MortenCopenhagen I am not mentioning the meaning of the word āhiddenā here. But, at first instance itself, why is Google not cautioning us about the public and private (hidden) reviews? We can save a lot of time and energy. Second, as asked by you, I have herewith attached the screen shot of the hidden review image that is shown to the public (incognito mode). You can also parallelly view my profile page for better understanding.
I just checked the relevant help page, @MortenCopenhagen , and is still mentioning hidden reviews and the possibility to appeal, citing also the European Union Digital Services Act resolution options.
Me too I have one hidden review that I cannot find.
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Thanks Ermes.
I will need to edit some tutorials re hidden reviews.
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I honestly think thereās a glitch somewhere, @MortenCopenhagen , more than an intentional change in Google Maps, and for this reason I am tagging here @MoniDi for a check and to escalate the issue to the team.
In fact in the help page you can find several interesting articles:
- Content removed and rejected for policy violations : āIf removed or rejected for a policy violation, your content may still be available in your Google Maps profile, but may be marked as āNot postedā, āPrivateā, āNot Acceptedā or similar. In some cases, your content or edits may be deleted entirely due to legal requirements or the severity of the violation.ā
- Report or Fix Content : āFix your content - You can edit your content on a computer or mobile device.ā
All the articles are confirming that normally the āremovedā AKA āPrivate or Hiddenā is visible on our private profile.
Regarding the discrepancy of one review in the count in my profile, I donāt have an explanation for this. I filled an appeal a couple of months ago because I had a difference of four reviews, and now the difference is of one, but I canāt find it, while I know that the other three were reviews related to locations in Japan.
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Hi @ErmesT,
Thank you for tagging me. I will share this with the team and get back to you if I have an update.
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Oh no, thank YOU @MoniDi .
Knowing how are āprivateā reviews are managed, and how to deal with them is extremely important for the community, because from this we can learn how to improve
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Hello @MoniDi,
as I said above:
As I remembered having the same issue several months ago using German UI, I changed my UI language to English yesterday and found 918 items listed under My Contributions - the same for being logged in and anonymous.
Now we need to understand that My Contributions->Reviews not only contains the reviews, but also the ratings without text. I wrote 662 reviews thereof 660 reviews are public and 272 ratings (all public), therefore the total number of items listed should be 948, i.e. 16 (14 public) ratings and/or reviews are not shown.
The earliest reviews, I see on the desktop are also the oldest shown in the Android app.
So, it is not a matter of not showing the hidden reviews, but rather not showing all reviews/ratings under My Contributions->Reviews.
Interesting also the fact that the UI language plays a role for, how many are actually shown in the list.
BTW, this demonstrates again the need of an easier method to identify hidden photos and reviews. The method, I use is quite time consuming and cannot be used by everybody.
FYI @MortenCopenhagen @ErmesT @StevenBerlin @VinayJayaram
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@MortenCopenhagen @WilfriedB @MoniDi
Since i started this thread about reviews, i wanted to ask a question just to tripple check before i spend hours.
Do you think this semi-hidden review issue might apply to photos now? I only ask since i have like 17,000 photos posted and around 130 hidden. I can never find my hidden photos either during an incognito search compared to normal search, and going through this amount of photos would take foreverā¦