Could anyone from technical team please investigate why my reviews are not publicly visible upon sharing link to others?
I firmly believe that I have made no guidelines violations.
Personally, I feel it is due to intervention of PR and marketing teams of corrupt companies that I have critically reviewed and point of this post is to request you to investigate this.
I was banned from Google guides program all this while, but ban was lifted 3 days ago possibly after your investigation.
I had similar experience on IMDB where my content reviews were being deleted, but now restored after complaining to their customer support.
Kindly let me know if you require any specific details. Given below is screenshot of sample review visible for me but unavailable for public
@devanshukashyap thank you for sharing. Sometimes, reviews are auto-filtered due to system checks. Try editing and resaving. Your contributions are truly appreciated!
Unfortunately, Google never tells us what exactly was the reason, why the AI filter did reject a review, photo or video.
Some hints:
The filter not only checks for violations of the rules, but more importantly also for suspected SPAM and false information. If there is only a little doubt, the review is rejected.
If photos or videos are attached to a review and only one of those is rejected, the entire review including all other media attached to it will be hidden, i.e. not published. Therefore, as a first step, remove all photos and watch if text-only is accepted.
Looking at your review, I notice several incomplete and unclear phrases. For example, what exactly means “Average service”? What led you to this statement?
I feel I have mentioned everything about food quantity and attitude of employers there upon stating my requirement.
In case cause of ban is text structure, there are plenty of one liner poorly written reviews that are publicly visible since years.
Multiple reviews, including comprehensive ones that were given by me since last year are not appearing. There was a ban on being a google guide and joining this community which was lifted 3 days ago, but reviews are still not visible.
Personally, I feel it is due to intervention of PR and marketing teams of corrupt companies that I have critically reviewed and point of this post is to lead to investigate this by Google.
I had similar experience on IMDB where my content reviews were being deleted, but now restored after complaining to their customer support.
Hi @devanshukashyap , welcome to Connect, and thanks for the tag, @WilfriedB
First of all we need to understand on point: fake reviews are not only a serious plague, but also a problem for the platforms where the reviews are hosted. In several countries there are laws against fake reviews, because this is a potential damage for both businesses and customers.
For this reason every platform is building AI based filters, to remove every suspected fake reviews.
The filters are obviously not perfect, and for this reason Google Maps provide the possibility to appeal for having the reviews released.
Looking at your profile we can see that actually you have 30 visible reviews, while 35 reviews and all your 6 photos (probably attached to the hidden reviews) are actually not visible.
To check what is not visible you can check your profile on a web browser in Incognito mode.
Obviously we cannot comment on what we cannot see. Regarding what is visible, I personally don’t see any real issue on the visible ones.
A negative review is perfectly fine when it’s proactive, and without personal attacks or an attempt to solve with the reviews situations that should be solved on a different way.
This is quite impossible, unless you mentioned terms like corruption in your review, I say this because terms like that can have a legal implications. On such case the reviews are not posted mostly to protect you.
When a review is reported it is normally analyzed, and it will be taken down only is really found to be against the policies.
My feeling is that most of your reviews were taken down when you were banned. If so, you will have to take actions for releasing them.
You can do this in two ways, but please check the policies first
The fast way: you can edit your reviews. In this way the reviews will be checked again, and if found to be not violating any policy, will be reposted.
if the first step doesn’t work it means that probably your account is still have a flag. It happened to me a couple of years ago, and everything I was publishing was immediately taken down. In this case you car submit an appeal for having your reviews checked by a trained operator, and hopefully released.
Please be aware that the check may take time (up to 2 months, in my case). You can find the appeal form at the end of this Official Topic: An update on how we moderate Google Maps reviews
Once you submit your appeal do not modify the hidden reviews. If you do this the date of the review will change, and will appear as more recent than the appeal. So that review will not be checked
You will not receive any feedback or notification from Google, but everything that is found to adhere to the policies wil be released.
Also note that in my case the first appeal was not sufficient to remove the flag on my profile. All the old reviews were published but I was not able to have the new reviews published. After the second appeal everything was fine .
