I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the number of times places that I’ve positively contributed with reviews, photos etc have been removed from Maps. I’m not talking about places that have closed, changed owners etc. Many of mine relate to tourist attractions, Churches and other heritage sites. They seem to get removed for no apparent reason. In my case it also seems to be happening with increased frequency.
I suppose it’s easy for spoilers to do it if a place has not been verified by the owner? Sometimes I note someone has moved the place first then created a new duplicate profile instead.
Does anyone have any observations in response to this post? Thanks!
Google often removes or restricts certain places for reasons like preventing spam, vandalism, fake reviews, or when a location has no verified owner and gets moved or duplicated, @MarkAuchincloss. If there’s unusual activity, Google might flag accounts or temporarily limit contributions from certain users — even unintentionally — as part of their spam-detection systems. So while it might feel like your efforts are being undone, it’s usually the system trying (imperfectly) to keep Maps clean and reliable. Keep contributing — the platform needs legit input like yours.
Hello @MarkAuchincloss
This kind of problem was discussed several times here on Connect. At least two times, historical monuments have been restored after I tagged @DeniGu and she escalated it to the team - therefore, I did tag her here too.
In the cases, I mentioned, all my photos and reviews have been restored after some days. Important is, to report it as soon as possible and to provide the link to the removed pin. Although the link is useless for us, it helps the Google team to recover the place.
Good luck!
CC @ErmesT
@MarkAuchincloss
Ich kann auch nur empfehlen solche Orte schnellst möglich, mit allen erforderlichen Daten an @DeniGu zu melden, damit die ursprünglichen Daten hergestellt werden.
Anscheinend macht es irgendjemand Freude Chaos zu verursachen und Schaden anzurichten oder sich selbst Vorteile.
Hi @Hope it’s great to get your encouragement, thanks for responding. Yes I like to think my contributions are legitimate. I understand what your saying. However, many places that do get removed are also long standing profiles like attractions and heritage sites so I’ve no idea whey they get removed if no circumstances have changed. I will keep at it.
Thanks for the tag, @WilfriedB @MarkAuchincloss I am used to this too. Unfortunately a lot of Users, instead of flagging the place as duplicate or permanently closed, decide to remove it from Google Maps.
As the location related to your review is in the EU you also receive a notification about the removed review. If it happened very recently you may be able to get the link to the removed review. If so please share it here because this may help the team to locate the original POI.
If you added some photo too you can also follow these steps:
on desktop, find the photos you added, now associated to an “Unknown place”
Click on “unknown place”
Copy the URL and paste it here in your reply. It will be something like this
Thanks @ErmesT for the detailed advice. I will try to implement it in the future. The boardwalk in Portugal I gave as an example is quite typical. I created a listing some years ago which had a lot of success. Then someone recently has created their own duplicate listing and managed Google to remove my earlier, successful listing. I must have been snowed under with work at the time it happened so I didn’t have time to react quick enough, that happens too! Cheers.
Hi @ErmesT it’s just happened again with a Church, my review isn’t posted notification. Someone has created a new listing and deleted the old listing. The new listing is also in wrong place. It’s Igrexa de Santa Maria de Muxia. Here’s a link to one of my photos
Thanks for the link, @MarkAuchincloss
Is this one the place (I can see it even if it will probably disappear soon) @DeniGu can you kindly escalate the issue?
Hi @ErmesT I just got another notification that a place has been removed that I created. This time it’s a new, small public square, Plaza de Manuel Gonzalez Is this one that we can escalate to @DeniGu ?
As Connect is focused on the Local Guides community and their experiences, we don’t usually have the capacity to look into reports of places that have been removed from Google Maps as that could happen for many reasons.
However, the Google Maps Help Community is where you can report anything related to Maps data issues, product feature issues, and more.
@DehnW yes I’ve noticed that too over the past week. Many POI’s Ive added to Maps over the years have suddenly been removed. It often happens when I’m snowed under with work matters etc so can’t always respond quick enough to report it.
That’s super sad, seems that Maps is closing many museums too.
Now I’m 100% sure that’s a bug and must be fixed. Now I’ve reported more than 2 museum that are closed only for Google Maps, even if those buildings are open.
@DehnW@MarkAuchincloss I’m facing the same issue at the moment with a fast food restaurant that suddenly disappeared and left me with a few hidden photos attached to Unknown Place.
