@bsimon
Flagging a review as private can be an automatic operation (made by an automated filter based on keywords), or manual, if your review have been reported, and checked.
- “I don’t see anything about my review that would be breaking those rules”
The filter is working on keywords, e.g. prices, because they can be interpreted as spam.
A review is made private when it seems to violates the Maps User Contributed Content Policy
As we cannot see your review, we can’t give you a better indication but, generally speaking, I can add that even a negative review is perfectly fine, but cannot be a blackmail for the business, nor a personal rant.
- “Even if my review was breaking some rules, shouldn’t it tell me that the review has issues rather than just silently block it?”
No, for a lot of good reasons:
- If a review is spam, Google will not tell to the spammer what to fix to have the review visible.
- more than 150 millions users are writing reviews, the reviews are checked, as I said, by a filter
- When we signed up to join the program, we confirmed that we were accepting the rules
In any case, making your review visible again is indeed possible, by modifying and republishing it, as you can read here below
Fixing your issue
As you can read in 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."
So please try to edit your reviews to make them public again
