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.