Google reviews offer a great at-a-glance way to show prospective customers how good you are at what you do, and if you leave reviews yourself, it becomes more likely that other people you’ve worked with will return the favour.
It’s surprisingly common, however, for a Google review to be left, yet not show up in your Google Business Profile or Google Maps entry. This will probably be because it has fallen afoul of Google’s policies on prohibited and restricted content.
There are quite a few of these, and some of them seem open to interpretation, so we’ve put together a straightforward list of the reasons why reviews don’t get approved. If you know someone has left you a review and you can’t see it, have a chat with them and see if they have accidentally been caught out by any of the below.
Obvious reasons
First of all, there are some review no-nos that are largely common sense. If any of these appear in reviews, it should be pretty clear why they’re not showing. Let’s get them out of the way:
• Harassment (including threatening or sexualising a person)
• Hate speech (similar to the above, but targeting a specific demographic)
• Impersonation (reviewers pretending to be someone they’re not)
• Misinformation (especially on medical or civic matters, with Covid-19 getting a section of its own)
• Adult and extreme content (including sexually explicit material, violence and gore)
• Restricted content (this might include links or promotion of alcohol, tobacco, gambling, firearms and anything else that comes with age or licensing restrictions)
• Dangerous content (promoting or encouraging harmful behaviour)
• Terrorism
• Child abuse
• Off-topic, irrelevant or gibberish content (if it has nothing to do with the business, or simply doesn’t make sense, it’s not likely to be approved)
Not so obvious reasons
Now, let’s look at some of the more subtle mistakes that people may make when leaving reviews. We’ve separated these because with them being less blatant examples of inappropriate reviews, it’s more likely you’ll come across them than any of the above:
• Promoting another business
This is one somewhat buried in Google’s policies (coming under “Advertising & solicitation”) but in the business-to-business world, we’d say it’s probably the main reason reviews get the thumbs down.
In short, reviews shouldn’t turn a review for your business into an advert for their own. That means not including the URL for their website, any social media links, phone numbers, email addresses or any other way a reader could contact their business.
• Fake engagement
Don’t be tempted to get your mates to leave five-star reviews of your business without having used it. Google is understandably keen to make reviews as genuine as possible and may reject reviews if it feels they don’t represent a real experience.
The same applies to poor reviews. Google is aware that rival companies may try to sabotage one another with unfair one-star reviews. Obviously, this is pretty unethical, but on top of this, there’s a chance that this sort of dishonest review won’t show up anyway.
Incentivising reviews (e.g. “give us five stars and we’ll enter you into our prize draw”) is also against Google’s policies.
Of course, this all comes down to Google’s judgement, so you may get away with it, but Google is getting better and better at detecting spam and misleading content, so it’s not worth the risk.
• Offensive language
Interestingly, Google doesn’t have a zero-tolerance policy on swearing, saying profanity may be allowed as long as is not designed to offend or emphasise criticism. Even so, it comes down to how much you trust Google to detect the nuances of how profanity is being used, so we recommend avoiding swearing, even if it’s done to big up a service.
• Personal details
Reviews might be shunned by Google if they give away too many personal details about an individual working for the business. Something as simple as posting a worker’s full name could be deemed to be in breach of this, although the caveat is that this is OK if the individual is a public-facing professional or their full name is commonly known within the business.
• Repetitive content
If a review doesn’t seem to have broken any of these rules yet still isn’t being accepted, it could be because the person leaving it has left too many similar reviews, so it’s almost a “duplicate content” rule coming into effect.
Reviews should be original, specific and relevant to the business, so it shouldn’t be a case of simply copying and pasting a template “positive” review. If your reviews look generic and don’t look like they’ve been tailored to your business, it could be a signal to Google that they are not unique.
Of course, Google has the final say on whether a review if acceptable or not, but we hope this provides a useful breakdown as to what sort of material should be avoided in reviews.
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