Can business owners remove negative reviews from customers?

Thanks for posting in Google help forums,

In Google my business listings,

Business owners are not able remove a review either positive or negative written by other Accounts,

Business owners can Flag a review,

Removal of the review is powered by Google when they do not comply with Google review policy.

I suspect the business owner asked Google to remove the comment, mentioning perhaps that it didn't comply, and that Google just removed it without veryfying whether the business owner was speaking the truth. Could this have happened? My comment was not in English.

FYI, it concerns my review on Argenta Tongeren. A local bank branch in the town of Tongeren. What's happening is that only I can see my review. No one else can. Pretty useless, no?

This would mean the removal is happening even secretly. Which is of course even worse, because that means there are probably millions of reviewers who don't know that their negative review has been removed by Google and/or the business owner.

Hello J Mattervun,

 

Parayil has already explained to you that businesses have no such option.

 

Google receives thousands of reviews a day, a good portion of which are either malicious attempts to spam or innocently inappropriate. Due to volume the reviews are all reviewed by algorithms. Those algorithms look for inappropriate language, patterns that spammers use, etc. There can be false positives, but overall the algorithms are very good. No notification of it's removal is given because they are almost all inappropriate and Google is not going to provide data to those with malicious intent as to exactly what the threshold for the filters might be.

 

The link to request that a place gets reviewed a second time is available to everyone, not just businesses. Because it has already been reviewed once this will seldom lead to a change in status.

 

If your review is hidden then we might be able to suggest what is wrong if you copy and paste the entire review into this thread along with a link to the business.

 

 

Thanks for this information. And for checking what might be wrong with my text. This is the business I was talking about: https://g.co/kgs/auP4RY.

And here is my text in the original language:

"

De dienstverlening in dit kantoor is beneden alle peil. Telefoons worden nooit opgenomen. Voicemail niet beantwoord. 

Een familielid werd slachtoffer van een ernstig geval van phishing. De Argenta app op de tablet (gloednieuw; laatste Android beveiligingspatches) van benadeelde, werd blijkbaar gehackt. Zowel de dagen voor, als vlak na de phishingscam, werd er meermaals gebeld naar dit kantoor om te melden dat er vreemde gebeurtenissen plaatsvonden. Er werd nooit op gereageerd. 

Indien Argenta Tongeren tijdig had gereageerd, had de scam wellicht voorkomen kunnen worden. Op z’n minst was de schade veel minder groot geweest. Nu kregen de scammers 4 dagen meer tijd om de rekeningen te plunderen. 

De kantoorhouder stelde zich achteraf ook erg arrogant op en vermeed contact met de benadeelde van deze scam. Er werd een afspraak gemaakt maar de kantoorhouder daagde simpelweg niet op. 

Dit kantoor is niet te goeder trouw. Er is sprake van ernstig schuldig verzuim.

".

Thanks for helping me finding out what might be considered as offensive. 👍

But if you could tell me if there are any offensive words, I'm happy to adapt this text of course.

Thank you for providing the text of the review.

 

Reviews are to describe personal interactions with a business. Your family member had an issue with them, therefore your family member should be the one posting the review, rather than yourself and your friend.

 

 

Attempting to test the boundaries of the algorithms via multiple accounts would also be the sort of thing that might appear spammy to those algorithms. It might now be that your family member could not post this review either even if it doesn't fail in any other way, they would need to instead write their experience from scratch.