To make it easy for you to submit your Google Maps profile for review, we’ve created a Google Form. Please use this form only if you believe that your contributions have been wrongfully unpublished.
Important: If your contributions comply with theMaps policies, they will be reinstated. Please keep in mind that it may take some time for us to ensure all reviews that we reinstate abide by our policies. Please also note that we will not alert you with the final result.
Update: 02/09/2022
While the root cause of this issue has been resolved, we’re continuously evolving our policies and protections to ensure that inappropriate content stays off the map. If you believe that your reviews have been wrongfully affected and are not published on Maps, please leave a comment below.
For more information on how reviews are moderated on Google Maps, check out our new video and blog post on The Keyword.
Update: 09/30/2021
Our team has successfully resolved the root cause of this issue. However, if you still have contributions that do not get published, please reach out to us in the comments below.
Update: 09/08/2021
We have identified the cause of this issue and reviews that do not violate our policies are in the process of being reinstated. We’ll update this thread once the issue is fully resolved and we thank you for your patience.
We’ve noticed an increase in the number of reports of Local Guides’ reviews and photos which have been unpublished. The team is looking into why this may be happening.
Thank you for your patience and understanding!
Please note: Any previous discussions about this issue will be merged into this thread.
Hi everyone, I’m 8 level local guide and have many contributions, but about month ago on my maps (on android phone and desktop) disappeared links to leave reviews. Even when I want to edit my old reviews something goin wrong and I can’t edit them. Can anyone help me to solve this issue?
I see you have made 409 reviews of which 396 are public. You could try to clean this up by taking a look at my tips presented here.
Please, also try Clear cache & cookies, if you have not already done so. The link has step-by-step instructions for Android, IOS, and Desktop. Just select the relevant tab at the top. But since your problem can be found across platforms I doubt this will help.
Let me tag @ErmesT for you. He might be able to give you a better explanation. In the meantime, it would be helpful if you would share a desktop and an android screenshot showing the missing options to edit and add reviews.
In some case, a place or an area can be locked to avoid Users Generated Content due to several reasons, like spam attack, or the need to protect the integrity of the data, but without more details it is difficult to respond
I have 1500+ reviews. Yesterday I received master reviewer badge, but on achievement it’s showing novice reviewer badge. From yesterday My review numbers are sometimes showing 1, sometimes 28. What’s wrong with it? Help me, please.
I can confirm that zero of your 1594 reviews are public. Seeing the numbers change lately is probably just due to the delay in synchronizing between servers.
Getting all your reviews made private is very likely caused by guidelines violations.
Hi @Asif71 and welcome to the Local Guides Connect Community,
Additional to the support documentation that @MortenCopenhagen has referred you to, as you can read here content that violates the policies can be removed from Maps listings and will be visible only to you. As you will see there are also instructions on how you yourself can fix a review that was flagged and removed:
If a review you wrote has been flagged and removed, you can fix it yourself. Edit your review to follow Google review policies — for example, you might remove a phone number or URL from the review. Your review will be automatically republished.
Google uses automated spam detection measures to remove reviews that are probably spam. Although legitimate reviews are sometimes inappropriately removed, these spam prevention measures help improve people’s experiences on Google by ensuring that the reviews they see are authentic, relevant, and useful.
I also recommend that you read the Community Policy as in briefly looking over your 250+ photos, I note that some of your photos are duplicate or near duplicate (see the first example below) and at least on one occasion it would appear that you have used the same photo for two different locations/reviews (see the second example below) which violates the mentioned Community Policy. You should make sure that you have not duplicated reviews across locations as this could trigger removal from the program.
While photos are a separate contribution and thus may be visible to the public while reviews may not, would you please confirm that your profile is not restricted. There’s a section in the notes here that may help you with this.
Finally, as you are new to Connect, I recommend that you check out the following articles and feel free to
According to "Flag and fix inappropriate content "If a review you wrote has been flagged and removed, you can fix it yourself. Edit your review to follow Google review policies — for example, you might remove a phone number or URL from the review. Your review will be automatically republished.
Google uses automated spam detection measures to remove reviews that are probably spam. Although legitimate reviews are sometimes inappropriately removed, these spam prevention measures help improve people’s experiences on Google by ensuring that the reviews they see are authentic, relevant, and useful".
A review is made private if Google thinks is fake or that doesn’t follow Google’s review policies. So if during your edit you added some word that can be interpreted as “not appropriate” (e.g. text copied from some online document, offensive, sexually explicit, etc…) the review may be no longer visible on the business listing.
You can try to edit your review again, to see if it is republished. From your profile I can see that actually this involves more than one review, and only 83, of the 95 written by you, are public.
The photos, even if associated with with the review, and uploaded when you wrote the review, are an independent Item, and will remain visible if the review is taken down
I also can edit the review to literally say something like, “Wow, what an awesome and tasty place, I loved their waffles!” and it still won’t display.
It was displaying before and I edited a basic grammar mistake and it seemed to completely fudge the review. Nothing inappropriate or guideline breaking.
@victor35 , first of all in the future please use @ to send a notification to the person you are talking to. In this way we will not miss your notification
"How do you know how many are private? " - Here below is a screenshot taken from your public profile: On the left, the amount of your public contents, on the right the amount of contributes uploaded by you
Thank you. Although, my profile on both desktop and mobile show 95 reviews - I can’t seem to find where it says I have any less.
I’m not sure if I’m convinced it was reported and removed, unless perhaps within a few seconds of making this random edit, it all suddenly happened. Even if this occurred, nothing in the review was malicious or even remotely report worthy.
Should I delete the review and try again? It will delete the photos I added of the place though.
I am happy to see you that @ErmesT helped you! I wanted to let you know that I am marking his comment as a solution so it can be beneficial for other members in the same situation. You can take a look the following post to know more: How do I mark comments as solutions?
I also moved your post to the How-tos section, which seems to be the most appropriate board for this type of content.
Hello, I noticed that my recent reviews are not showing up publicly on Google Maps. I have written over 1300 reviews and everything is based on my experience. I wonder why this could be… Is there any known delays to publish reviews these days? Please help.
I wanted to let you know that I am marking his comment as a solution so it can be beneficial for other members in the same situation. You can take a look the following post to know more: