[SOLVED] Spamming Reviews on Maps (4,000+ Negative Reviews in 3 hours)

Google Maps tips & tricks
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Howdy folks!

So yesterday as I was just surfing through Twitter, I came across a thread of Zainab O., a 24-year old Nigerian, who had just decided to open up about her life-threatening experience at a beach hotel in Zanzibar.

Exactly one year ago, Zainab decided to take a 6-day trip vacation to Zanzibar where she had booking with a 4-star beach hotel, Warere Beach, where she planned to celebrate her 23rd birthday as a solo female traveler. Unfortunately, according to Zainab, her first night was a nightmare which she is still trying to recover from the trauma of the life threatening experience that she just had. She reported that she was sexually assaulted by a male guard from the hotel in the middle of the night and was robbed her money in cash that same night.

Fortunately enough for her story, she documented what has happened and reached out to the hotel management and further demanded compensation of $10k in cash from the hotel but agreement was not met because they wanted to take the whole process legally.

She decided to drag them publicly on Twitter (you read more from the thread here) and Instagram and called for everyone to boycott the hotel and every other planned vacation to Zanzibar. This immediately gather attention and a lot of retweets from people who sympathized with her and the story, even without hearing from the hotel officials themselves.

People now went on reporting the business page on Google Maps, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Instagram, etc. They immediately had them about 4,000+ negative reviews within 3 hours. This brought down their star rating from 4.5 down to 1.1

Screenshot on the left shows Google map profile of the hotel before the negative comments attack. Photo on the right shows after attack.
Screenshot on the left shows Google map profile of the hotel before the negative comments attack. Photo on the right shows after attack.3464×2996 370 KB

This is how the single story shattered a 6-year of verified positive reviews of a woman-led business into the pits of downfall.

These reviews included people that have never been to the hotel or have experienced such but believed in her story which she had evidences but yet to hear officially from hotel, I know it is not within the guidelines of adding reviews either positive or negative to write on something you have not seen or experienced.

I’m bringing this to connect to hear opinions and understand if this kind of solidarity attack is permissible to bring down business?

Also, under no circumstances is assault of any kind permissible and should always be dealt with accordingly. Again I sympathize with Zainab as she heals from the past experience. I can’t imagine how helpless she must have felt all through and was her only way of letting it out.

Hope to hear from you. Cheers!

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Hi @Nuhuu

Definitely this behavior is not acceptable on the map.

But really I don’t know what Google can do to fight this in general.

Because without local knowledge that is prepared by us, Google will not put time on individual businesses to check one by one and even after understanding, checking all reviews to detect and remove wrong ones is too difficult. If Google remove all reviews during the attack then there maybe some correct and real ones and those also be removed.

I also saw such huge attack based on social media posts but mostly for positive reviews. In one case only in few days one businesse reached several k positive reviews just because they promoted a campaign and ask followers to review.

I also like to hear suggestions in this case to fight such behavior.

@ErmesT @JanVanHaver @MortenCopenhagen

Your ideas are much appreciated.

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To my knowledge @Amiran @Nuhuu such an amount of reviews in a short time will trigger some alarm in the algorithms already, causing the team to look into it.

I’m tagging @DeniGu here to allow escalation if needed.

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Hi @Nuhuu and @Amiran ,

As @JanVanHaver mentioned, contributions, either positive or negative, that are not based on real experience and information are against the Maps User Contributed Content Policy. Any campaigns by businesses or individuals that ask people to leave reviews, which are not genuine, are not allowed.

In this regard, @Nuhuu , I noticed that the rating for Warere Beach is back to 4.4 and there are 214 reviews. So this issue has been resolved. :blush: Please note that I’ll change the topic of your post to How-tos as this is the best place to share feedback or report an issue. I’d also like to ask you to please remove the business images from your post that don’t belong to you, to align with our Connect original content guidelines. Thank you!

@Amiran I’ll let the team know about the business you flagged. It’d be helpful if you could share more information (and links) about where the business ran a campaign to collect reviews. Thank you, too!

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That is great @DeniGu to understand Google can revert these kinds of wrong activities.

Thanks for letting us know and thanks to @JanVanHaver for that nice information.

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Thanks for your quick response @Amiran . At least now we have a clarification on these type of issues which will be easier to deal with for future occurrences.

Thank you @JanVanHaver @DeniGu for the the User Contributed Content Policy. Now we know there well-defined policies to guide enhanced shared experiences. And for the pictures, Oops, i thought to share them (giving credit of course) to give a clearer view to the said POI. Anyways, i have taken them off.

Cheers

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