As a business owner, you only need to claim the review is fraudulant and that will usually get it removed.

In theory a review hoster is supposed to evaluate claims and act on reasonable ones. In practice review hosters are terrified of getting sued and will take down reviews easily.

I suspect most local businesses hire "reputation fixing" firms to actually do this dirty work for them.

I helped a couple of small businesses set up maps business listings a few years back. One was going great for years then in about 3-4 days got a bunch of fraudulent bad reviews from a disgruntled ex exployee. We tried for months to remove them, every single way possible but were never able to. In the end we had to nuke the whole Google business listing, which wasn't easy either.

You can reply though, IIRC. A good response to a negative review is a massive plus to me.

Aside: somehow businesses get moved - even major ones like a local McDo got moved to the wrong location. Takes weeks for corrections from when I report them. I really can't understand that one. This too could be a killer for a small business, getting shifted to the wrong location.

In a similar vein, I'm forever having to report our opening hours and things to Facebook as we don't have any (small craft shop, open by arrangement) and people insist on adding some.

It's all really weirdly handled. I suppose it's the presence of untrustworthy parties in such disclosures though Google should have enough trust signals to weight users input.

I don't know how to square this claim with the plethora of businesses with many negative reviews on both Google and Yelp. If it were this easy, you'd think everyone would be doing it. Probably someone would have written a blog post describing how to do so. I can find out how to buy gmail accounts on Google, but I can't find out how to remove business reviews. Maybe the claim is just that most small businesses are very honest?

In any case, the scenario you're describing is decidedly not pay-for-play on Google's part, and thus doesn't really impinge on my response to OP.

I think almost all SME owners would assume they'd have to pay (Yelp model), rather than just be able to lie and say it's fraud. Also who is going to advertise after the fact that they falsely had reviews removed - risking getting dumped by Google?

I'll assume Google's reviews are at least somewhat likely to be biased (either way!) until reason to believe otherwise. The "you don't know the review wasn't posted by a dog" position.

I don't really care if you assume the reviews are biased. I assume that all review websites have some number of fake reviews, and it's unlikely that exactly half of the fake reviews are negative and the other half positive. Therefore all review websites would have some bias vs the ground truth sentiment. My only objection is to baseless accusations of malfeasance.

Absolutely not true. Worked on this team for Google at one point and other than internal systems nothing can get reviews removed. Firms cant do anything, they are just swindling people out of money. Some of them will get fake reviews to try and drown out negative ones but its very short lived.

Yet, reviews can be removed :).

Reviews can be removed if they are shown to violate Google policies. Also, legal action can be taken to remove a review. Google does not write law about what reviews are permanent.

Seems to me that if reputation firms are buying reviews and their effect is "short lived"... then those reviews are getting removed.

I thought the part about "only internal systems" would imply that external parties can not remove reviews. But if not then let me clarify, yes there are anti-abuse mechanisms that can remove reviews. But these are not based on customer complaints or how much they are paying Google for ads, they are based on Googles own internal policies which are designed to make sure the reviews are legitimate.

> review hosters are terrified of getting sued

I wish Google would be terrified of getting sued, but we both know this is not gonna happen.

My friend is a business owner.

She received couple one-star reviews on google maps from customers she never had (she’s a real estate developer, real estate is expensive, she doesn’t have many customers).

Wasn’t able to do anything about them.

I don’t know how they did it, but a doctor surgery near me (UK) had a large number of negative reviews up for several years. About one week ago, I looked and they now have one single 5 star review. So, anecdotally, there is at least some way to get the reviews removed.

Kinda like how they handle false copyright claims by not taking down the content, oh wait ... that seems a similar situation in that acting on false content takedown requests doesn't get them [much/any] revenue and provides a relational hit to users (but pleases some huge customers, no doubt).

Someone has given a credible mechanism for take down, report it as fraudulent. I find it highly likely that if you have a paying B2B relationship - eg you're a high paying advertising client, that you'd be able to report "frauds" and get immediate action.

But if course I've wouldn't know, and presumably Google would have NDAs for businesses in any special access (it would also be detrimental to the business to disclose it and risk losing the special access).

All we've really got is our TrustRank RTM on our part experiences with Google and similar corps.

> There is no way to do this that I can find documentation of on the public internet.

And you used Google search to look for it, right? ...

(Kidding.)

There is probably a button for business owner to complain about a review, for example in case of competitor bombing? Since nothing on google can be appealed this button is as good as removal of reviews at will

And if your affiliation to this business is based on ad spend then well...

Again, I can't find even a hint of how to do this on the internet. If there is a way, you'd expect it to be documented given what surely must be widespread interest in the subject. Basically what we have here is an entirely unsubstantiated and unlikely accusation. (Unlikely because the incentives simply are not aligned.)

Saying "I wouldn't be surprised if..." is not an accusation, unless you count the implied "I don't trust Google" as an accusation.

If you said of someone, "I wouldn't be surprised if they were a thief," that would rightly be viewed as a pseudo-accusation of thievery or other dishonesty. It doesn't literally mean the same thing as "he is a thief," but saying you believe someone has a decent chance of being a thief is still a type of accusation -- one of dishonesty and distrust. If the belief is unjustified, then I think it's fair to call it an unsubstantiated accusation.

But if that doesn't work for you, pretend I called it an unsubstantiated implication instead. Either way, I think we all understood what the OP meant, and we all understood what I meant in my response. So at least we are communicating.

We are sort of communicating. I _am_ the OP. And I only meant it as "I don't trust Google."

I'll let you decide if that implication is unsubstantiated or not.

You should just say that, then. If I don't trust someone, that doesn't mean it's OK to go around and imply that they do some absurd malicious thing I have absolutely no evidence they actually do. It's fine not to trust them. Spreading unsubstantiated rumors and implications is not fine.

You go out each day and pigeons have shat (pooped) on your car.

Today you go out and there's a pigeon sitting on the branch over your car, you scare it away.

Your friend is like "what did you do that for, you have no evidence this pigeon poops on cars!".

Your [asdfasgasdgasdg] position is "this pigeon might be fine" the OP's position appears to be [or at least, mine is] "pigeons are probably going to poop on my car". You're saying his position is insubstantiated ...

It's the difference between treating Google as unique, and treating them as a member of a class of businesses. It's not insubstantiated, it's just a different form of substantiation. If all advertising businesses the OP has dealt with before were underhanded then your position looks to them like "today is unique, maybe the sun won't rise".

tl;dr you can substantiate a position based on general behaviours of items in a class, it's not necessarily wrong, and can be just a different model.

But there are no popular review websites that allow business owners to pay to remove negative reviews. So the inductive approach you advocate favors my position.

I just wanted to mention that I adore the way you articulated and called out everything that was going on here.