Lately I’m having a lot of issue to write reviews on Google Maps, but I don’t really see why that is exactly.
According to my profile I have over 1600 reviews on Google Maps. I’ve written all of them myself, for all the places I have visited. Some of the reviews are longer than others, but I try to make them as detailed/specific as possible. I do not add any personal information.
When I click on the “more details”, I cannot see anything useful that helps me. Sometimes I can submit an appeal, but in most cases that option is not possible. I have no clue what policies I would be violating with my reviews
Even older reviews that were written years ago, are getting marked as “Not Posted”.
As already said, I’ve written a lot of reviews already; and I’m Google Maps level 10. I would expect some more credibility and not deleting all my posts without any notification… It’s rather frustrating to see your reviews marked as “not posted” when you put some time in writing them.
I like to write reviews, but if Google Maps doesn’t want them, then I will stop writing them of course.
Do more people have this issue? Have you been able to find the reason for this?
Hi Nicolas @ndsmyter , welcome back to Connect. It is a long time I don’t see you here.
Like @SarathUpendran said on his AI generated reply, you are not alone.
Obviously your account isn’t restricted (the form you used doesn’t help for private (hidden) reviews, but me too I used it the first time that I started to receive the “Not posted” message in Maps and via email.
I am quite sure you did it already, but in any case I prefer to ask: have you already compared your profile in Incognito mode to see how many private reviews do you have? I ask because the message about not posted reviews is used only for reviews posted in listings inside the EU. If you didn’t already, please check and let me know. I can’t share directly the link with you because you choose to not share it in your profile in Connect, but feel free to DM me for a more detailed reply.
It is not so easy to explain but due to legal implications a few years ago all the platform that are hosting reviews started to use some very strong filter that is blocking a lot of legitimate reviews. I wrote a quite long post to explain what’s going on: Your review has not been published. Do you know why?
No link to appeal
Regarding the reviews with the not posted message, when there is not a link to appeal is normally because the issue is related to one of the attached media. When something is considered inappropriate Google Maps is blocking all the post (reviews with photos) so the first thing to do is edit the review to delete all the media. If in this way the review is accepted, edit the review again adding the media one by one, to find the one that is triggering the filter. If you have to attach also videos add them at the end. The videos are checked and during the check (it may take a few hours) you have a false positive “not posted” that normally disappear once the check of the video is completed.
Normally in my case this is enough to fix the issue.
For reviews posted in Listings located outside the EU you don’t receive any message, and you don’t have any “individual appeal” related to that specific review. The procedure to fix it is the same mentioned above, but you will have to check your profile in Incognito mode to see if the review is posted.
If not, to appeal use the form that you will find at the and of this article: An update on how we moderate Google Maps reviews - Google Maps tips & tricks - Local Guides Connect
Last time I filled it it took more than two month for my profile to be checked and all the reviews released and posted, so if you have to use it you will have to be very patient.
Ok, @SarathUpendran .
Honestly I believe you should follow the same steps I suggested to Nicolas to check you profile, because more than 25% of your reviews are not published, and the same happens to one third of your photos.
Some of the photos that are visible are clear violations of the policies, and many of your reviews sounds like AI generated too, so I am expecting more of them will disappear.
I wonder why you are not aware of this.
Oh, don’t trust what the AI wrote regarding the appeal (your point two). What is written in there simply doesn’t exists. Same for point four.
You know, this was one of the funniest conversation I had with Gemini. He gave me a similar reply, so I asked for the sources and when the AI shared them with me I pointed out the differences between the sources and his reply. “I do apologize, I am only a text model” was the final answer.
Kindly, do not use the AI to respond to questions here in Connect.
Hey @ErmesT,
Thanks for the reply. It has indeed been a long time. I wasn’t a fan of the previous version of the localguidesconnect website. Giving it another try in the new version
I will try your suggestions. But it does sound a lot of manual labor to go through all of them. I’m talking numerous posts…
I know @ndsmyter .
Well, this feature (sending a notification about an hidden review) was tested in France first. When I visited Paris and most of my contributions were automatically flagged as “not posted” it was quite discomforting. At that moment an appeal for every single review was not available, so I had to wait a long time for my reviews to be checked and released. I think that when a certain amount of reviews are flagged, in some way our account is flagged too (even if there are no penalties), and a lot of new reviews were instantly made private. It took several months, and several appeals, for my account to be considered again “clean”. After that I followed very close the situation and the evolution of the filter, to try to help others with the same issue.
Fortunately now we are notified for all the reviews “not posted” inside the EU. As the notification comes also via email, a search in your inbox will probably help to speed up the process of finding the hidden ones, and to act for having them released.
Just one note: if you have to make some changes in your hidden reviews, including removing photos and videos, do it before to appeal.
Every chance made after the appeal will make the review to appear as a new one, and the appeal for that review will be automatically cancelled.
Also keep in mind that, if you attach a video, at first the review will appear as “not posted”. You should wait up to a day before to have it posted. This is an already reported glitch, because during that time the review should appear as “under check”.
Good luck, and please let me know if you need any help
Hey @ErmesT ,
I have now several reviews that do not even have images (and never had) that still get rejected. Following your explanation, I should be able to appeal, but that’s not the case either.
Really starting to doubt if I will ever have the experience and fun I used to have writing these reviews. There was a time I found it fun to do, now it just become a hassle if I have to appeal every single review I write.
Below some screenshots of a review that never had pictures, without a way to appeal.
I just have the feeling I’m being blocked in the process here. And I’m willing to try, how will newcomers react to this. They will just stop immediately I assume
Thanks for sharing the screenshot, @ndsmyter
I read a lot about this situation, but I never experienced it personally.
Like the message said, your account is restricted, and you cannot post any review. This seems to be the extreme step that is taken by Maps when you have a large number of reviews that are hidden because suspected of “fake engagement”.
Have you checked how many hidden reviews you have?
In any case to remove the block you have to check your Google Account following the link in the message, and submit an appeal.
After that it will be possible also to submit the appeal for having all the reviews reinstated
@ErmesT
Apparently almost ALL of my reviews have been marked as Not Posted. I’ve already reposted some of them, going through without a problem. But of the 1693 reviews I have in my personal space, I can see that only 135 of them are now public. More than half of that number I have reposted in the last day. But it is a hell of a job because the page reloads every time.
I don’t have any way to appeal. I have followed every link there is to follow, none of them have something to appeal. In most cases I just come up to a Help page that ironically is not helping me.
@MoniDi ,
Thanks. Because I’m not really looking for the need to go through ALL of my reviews manually. Every time I repost a review, it goes back to the top of the list. I have to scroll back down to the next review that needs reposting.
And it also doesn’t seem like the reviews I repost, remain reposted. They get denied once again after a while. Some go through anyway, but most of them are blocked again.
For the ones that get blocked again, after reposting, I can now appeal. But I hope I don’t have to go through all 1500 reviews again to 1) repost them, 2) appeal after they get denied again.
If it takes me 30s per review to post, and 30s to repost (consider a lot of scrolling for the oldest ones); it would take me 2 x 1500 x 30 = 90 000 seconds; roughly 25 hours.
Let’s just say that I’m not willing to spend that much time; how hard I want it back to the original state.
Hi @ndsmyter
First of all try this link to appeal for removing the restrictions: https://myaccount.google.com/restrictions
In this way you will be able to see if you are still having a restriction.
If there are no restrictions you may be able to submit a cumulative appeal
Hey @ErmesT ,
As stated in my first post, there are no restrictions on my profile. So whenever I click that link, it just says that there are no restrictions (see screenshot below)
That’s the annoying part, really, I don’t see anything that should be actually blocking me. For whatever reason almost all of my reviews are blocked, but I don’t see why. My appeals are getting approved, so at least the people that handle the appeals think the same way. Now just to find a way to repeat the process for 1500 more reviews
Oops, @ndsmyter , looks like I missed the second screenshot on your initial post, while my attention was caught by the one where it is declared that you have some restrictions, because it could explain why your reviews are constantly blocked.
This is an interesting contradiction, and most probably the reason why @MoniDi escalated it to the team.
As the team is aware of the issue I will wait a few days to have a feedback before to start the titanic work of reposting your reviews one by one.
I know very well how difficult is to do this on desktop, where every time you have to scroll down again your contributions.
Have you tried to do that on mobile too?
Thanks for your help @MoniDi
I can indeed see that 1679 of my 1692 reviews are back online. I’ll go through the others to find out why they are not according to the Google Maps policies.
I have the feeling it was only a temporary solution, as some of my reviews are going back to “not posted”. Where I had 1679 reviews only 2 days ago, I’m now back to 1627 (and dropping) public reviews. I’m getting a lot of mails with “Nicolas, your rating isn’t posted” as we speak. Around 1 mail every couple of seconds.
This time I can press the appeal button. But I do hope I’m not going to get >1600 mails I have to appeal again. I wouldn’t want to be the person that has to review them.
Thanks. I saw some reviews being reinstated. At the moment I’m getting denied mails again, for the same reviews that were removed earlier and reinstated by the team.
So, I think there is still something wrong between what they are manually reinstating and what the algorithm is checking.
For the moment everything seems stable. The only annoying thing is that the places I’ve reviewed remain disconnected from what Google thinks I haven’t reviewed.
When I visit a place I have already reviewed, Google Maps will come and suggest me to review it in the Contribute screen. When I edit my old review, it goes away for a moment, but comes back immediately after I refresh. If I add a new review, I loose the images and text of my old review (thus completely overwriting it). I can also dismiss it, but then it will come back on my next visit.
So, I’m stuck in rewriting (or copy-pasting) all of my reviews again anyway if this goes on.
@MoniDi hopefully you have some magic left to solve this issue too
