I went on holiday a few weeks ago and after returning, reviewed many places I’d visited.
I reviewed 27 places, of which there are a few reviews that are showing on my profile but won’t show on Google.
These are:
Old Doha port, Al Fanar, and Harab 'be Café reviews.
I tried to repost them again on Monday, the Old Doha port with 3 photos have gone live but the rest of the photos haven’t gone live and showing no views.
Al Fanar, and Harab 'be Café reviews I’ve tried reposting 5 times with no luck.
My reviews have always met all the Google’s Guidelines, no violations and have no account suspension.
I’ve been posting reviews for 5 years and as photographer all the photos posted are mine. I regularly receive updates that my reviews are helping others etc.
Also, 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.
I did as you advised and managed to successfully upload 2 reviews.
I don’t understand why one photo would be a culprit when they were all taken around the same time.
Is there a set limit can only upload 5 photos?
For me leveling up and receiving photo views encouraged me to upload more reviews and photos.
Uploading one photo at a time and then the review doesn’t go live so I have to delete and start again, it’s taken out all the enjoyment. To top it off there’s no views on the photos.
I just found the @user_not_found post where there are hundreds of reviewers having the same issue as myself.
Why has it been marked as solved when the issue is ongoing?
I understand Google has made a change in their spam filter. This issue first occurred in February, it’s April now.
Is there a bug, are they doing anything to resolve this issue? Will it ever be resolved?
In an attempt to automate their workload Google has made the service worse for users. A poor review automatically gets flagged, Google doesn’t believe you can have a poor experience.
They should allow the community to vote posts up or down on all posts, the posts negatively voted should be investigated for spam.
I already have a job I can’t do Sundars job for him.
I can’t speak for others, but personally I find a review telling me “bad food” etc. without any further info not so informative. I personally consider writing a review (most of the time) as the answer to the question “What would I like to know about this place myself before visiting it?” and if you write “food is bad” I can’t find out what was bad about it. Voting for a review could be a possibility, but also be used for negative effects: suppose that you have someone who’s blackmailed and the blackmailer uses the downvoting system for reviews for bringing someone in trouble, … So, I consider a successfull working of the system not only the responsibility of the maker =google in this case, but also the users are responsible. Uploading pictures just for the points seems not a good strategy to me: use pictures in an efficient way for showing others what’s important when visiting a place.
Google has an issue with their AI based moderation that’s incorrectly seeing certain reviews that it believes violate the rules.
There also seems to be a slow-down in approvals for new places, uploading photos is hit and miss.
The whole edit and edit and check and edit and keep trying to get the review to post or appeal and hope they see sense has become a long winded process. All the while the reminders keep coming to submit content “you’re popular”.
Looking through similar posts it’s still all very “sometimes it takes a while” or “you can ask for it to be looked at via this form”.
Actually nobody is even trying to fix it because they get enough content from the millions of other Local Guides so the frustration from a few thousand doesn’t matter.
It’s a shame because it’s depriving businesses of reviews and users of content to use to make decisions.