How To Remove Fake Reviews From Google
In last week’s show I pointed out how we had received fake pretty nasty reviews and asked you if could leave a nice one. Many of you did so thanks. This is a big problem for a lot of businesses and I have seen this many times over the years. Competitors leaving fake reviews and disgruntled former employees leaving fake reviews are the two biggest groups. Hopefully this guide helps you. This is not for bad reviews or an unreasonable customer but it may help for that as well.
Step 1. Address The Fake Review
This may seem annoying to have to respond to something that is completely fake but it is the first step Google recommends and I doubt you will be able to get any further in the process with out doing this.
Step 2: Flag the review
This is a pretty simple process as you will see in today’s video. When you click on the flag next to the user’s name you will be taken to another page.
Then you will be taken to a page that looks like this.
Here’s the tricky bit. The 4 options you are given are a cut down version of a much larger subset of review policies you can find here. Choose the one that best fits your situation. For the most part fake reviews are conflicts of interest. Even the drop down
When you compare that list to the full review policy you will see it is very much a condensed version of the real thing. Once you have done that we left it 24 hours before contacting Google again.
Step 3. Contact Google About The Fake Review Via Phone
We actually had 3 shots at this and it was on the third occasion we got some action. It felt like we were dealing with people who did not want to change the status quo. Here’s how you call Google.
Inside your local listing account at business.google.com on the top left hand side you will see a “hamburger” navigation menu.
Click on it and then click “support”
Then another pop up support menu will appear on the top right hand side. You could choose to chat or phone. I chose to phone.
We ended up speaking to them at least three times trying to get reviews removed. I had pointed out from their own policies, where the two reviews were in violation of it but they blatantly refused to agree. It was ridiculous. So then I pointed out that they were in breach of the Australian Competition & Consumer Act of 2010 as outlined by the ACCC here.
Step 4 – Legal Removal Request
They then suggested I fill out the form for legal removal requests which can be found at support.google.com/legal . I filled the form out for both reviews but heard nothing back. At this stage I was at a bit of a loss what to do next as from my reading of it, Google was in breach of the act but there was no clear direction on what a business should do in that situation. So I tweeted the ACCC.
And they directed me back to the page that I had already directed Google to, when I filled out the Legal Removal Request form. As this was not very helpful I contacted the media office and asked for a comment on the subject for the blog. Their response;
I followed up with Meg via phone to get some clarification. Basically the ACCC cannot help, they get over 100,000 complaints per year and “fake reviews are not a focus”. Crazy eh?
At the same time I had also asked Google’s media office for comment, but had not heard back at the time of recording. 24 hours later I did. Here is Google’s official position in relation to fake reviews.
Here was the awesome piece of news, the content policy she is referring to is the one I have linked to above. We were now able to go back to step 3 armed with that piece of information. Our request was escalated once we pointed out where the policies were being broken. A few hours later both reviews were removed. Incidentally, this morning we also heard back from Google Legal saying they could not find the reviews LOL. Have you got a fake review? Let me know if this helps, of course it wont stop fake reviews appearing in the future but it should make it easier to remove them.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
