By NOTE: This is part of an extended study by our SEO Agency on fake negative reviews on Google Maps. This is part 1, part 2 is coming soon.
Navigate this article:
- Introduction
- Examples of Fraudulent Negative Reviews Google is Not Taking Down
- How Google Helps Encourage More Fake Negative Reviews
- What Google Can Do Better to Discourage Fake Negative Reviews and Negate Their Impact on Small Businesses
Introduction
Negative reviews suck, but we all know it’s improbable to have 100% of customers who ever interact with your business be satisfied, so a few negative reviews here and there from legitimate customers is to be expected.
Any business owner who’s been in business for at least a few years will tell you though that fake negative reviews are part of their everyday life, especially on Google Maps, and that it’s nearly impossible to fight them. Businesses who gain a lot of reviews in a short period of time with little effort such as restaurants have less reason for concern here as a few fake negative reviews will dissipate quickly. However, for businesses; that must work for weeks or months to satisfy one client to the point that customer will be willing to leave a review, are a business that sells high ticket items / services, or are a new business; this becomes far more problematic and can place that business at the mercy of scammers and other nefarious actors.
While fake negative reviews are an unfortunate reality all businesses face, for the past several years we had seen a decline in suspected and verified fake negative reviews for our clients. Over this period of time we had seen the occasional blip of suspected fake negative reviews here and there, especially when a client started ranking highly on a high value keyword, but in general across our clients it was a minor problem – a nuisance.
Unfortunately, since the start of this year we have witnessed a massive rise in the number of known fraudulent reviews created with the sole purpose to cause harm to a local business. Not only is Google doing very little about these nasty reviews, in many cases it appears they are helping them stay alive and unwittingly encouraging more fraudulent fake reviews to be posted in the future.
Whether this rise is being caused by a bug in Google’s systems or by a really terrible process being operated by Google’s outsourced support teams is unclear. What is clear, is that nefarious actors are quickly realizing they can leave fraudulent reviews and cause harm and in at least some cases are starting to use this to try and blackmail or push small businesses around.
To be fair to Google, they do take some clearly fake reviews down and quite quickly after reporting – typically within a few hours. After a few hours though all of the other fake negative reviews appear to stay live for weeks, months, or years on end with almost no way of communicating to Google that there is a problem with their system. Some of these flagged fake reviews have been up for as long as 3-years that we’ve tracked so far! In our testing there’s almost a 50% split, if you get 2 fake negative reviews in one day, it’s highly likely one will stick and the other will come down though we do see variations of this split, having 100% of fake negative reviews removed almost never happens.
At the end of this article I note some things Google (or any other review gathering company) could do to make their reviews more trustworthy and less likely to be abused by spammers. However, I want to touch on one of the single worst things Google does first – and that is the “Decision Pending” stage. When users of Google Maps or the owner / manager of a profile flag a potentially fake review it immediately gets set to “Decision Pending” on the back end. This is what the email you get with a report means, that someone in Google’s system will review this review at some point in the future and decide the legitimacy and fate of the review. Unfortunately, this phase can last for years on end (as mentioned earlier and shown below) and the only way Google provides to remotely fix it is not easy to find, access, or understand. When you Google your own business name you’ll see a list of icons you can use to manage your business listing and how it appears on Google and Google Maps. This includes icons for “Read Reviews” and “Ask for Reviews”, there is one reviews icon missing, however. There should be one for “Manage Reviews” a tool Google offers to business owners and profile managers to escalate claims about fake reviews to a Google support member for evaluation. Since this icon doesn’t appear anywhere, most business owners (and frankly most SEO consultants) do not know it even exists. You can find it by searching on Google for this phrase “Manage My Google Business Reviews”.
One of the quickest solutions Google could implement to reduce fake negative reviews is to place a cutoff timer on the human evaluation team. If a flagged negative review is not validated by a human reviewer in x-period of time it should be at the very least disabled from being visible on a business profile or even better default to what the owner / manager flagged the review as. With a system like this scammers trying to attack businesses with fake reviews lose, Google is more incentivized to find automation solutions to cut down on human labor costs, and small businesses are allowed to thrive with peace of mind knowing Google has their back.
As it stands Google appears to think of their reviews system as iron clad so they likely do not see the need for such a system that would stamp out fake negative review scammers. Below I will give four examples of this all from clients of ours and all we have verified with 100% certainty are fake reviews likely left to harm the business to help show how their current system is simply not up to the task of removing enough fake negative reviews. Client names and any employee names are redacted or removed for privacy. The reviewer’s name and Google profile photo is not removed.
Examples of Fraudulent Negative Reviews Google is Not Taking Down
1. A Moving Company Hit With Fraudulent Reviews That Use Publicly Available Images
This company suddenly received several fake negative reviews in the middle of the night their time. Most likely these were paid for by a competitor attempting to cause damage to their reputation and were executed by the overseas vendor at night.
Google quickly took down around half of the reviews, but weeks later 2 of the worst offenders are still live. These reviews used photos from around the web, one using a photo from Shutterstock and one using a photo from a recent Reddit post. We estimate that because of these photos and their claim to have been a customer in the review it self, Google’s outsourced vendor staff likely skipped over these and left them in “Decision Pending” stage.
We instructed the client to reply to the reviews with links to where the photos came from to prove they were fake reviews and still weeks later Google Maps has yet to remove these – I am doubtful Google employees have even seen the replies based on the status of the review reports.
2. A Medical Facility With an Angry Customer and Her Friends
A medical client of ours instructed a patient that they couldn’t perform a procedure due to a medication the patient is on. The patient tried desperately to force the staff to change their minds arguing and yelling for a long period of time, but the staff stood firm explaining that they wouldn’t do the operation because of this complication and that if a facility did it would be detrimental to the patient’s health and well being. The management for this healthcare institution agreed with their staffs decision and backed them up as well.
The patient exploded in a fit of rage inside of the facility and after finally leaving posted on social media asking her friends and family to flood the medical facility’s Google profile with fake reviews, many of which complied with the request.
Soon the nasty negative reviews for the medical personnel in charge of declining the patient’s request were piling up. Many of these reviews were calling the staff person names and others demanding that this person be fired or have some other consequence applied by the facility. Some just left a 1-star rating and said nothing. All of these fake negative reviews came in late in the evening while the business was closed and all within just a few minutes of each other.
Even though it was late and after hours, when the client notified us of this negative review attack (Google had only sent us 1 email about them so far) our team immediately started working to report these to Google hoping it would trigger something in their system to realize there was a negative review attack happening and that they would remove all of these reviews for violating their rules.
Again as before, Google removed many of the fake reviews quickly after the client and our team reported them but at about halfway decided to stick the rest into the ‘decision pending’ phase where they have sat now for over a month. In total there were about 11 negative reviews from this attack, one of which came from the patient who was denied. The other 10 came from this patient’s family and friends, a bulk of which live in another country and have never visited the country or city the facility is in. Google removed 4 of these fake reviews within a few hours, then 1 more in the following week, and 1 more a few weeks later. The rest have been stuck in ‘decision pending’ ever since and there is little hope they will be removed any time soon.
What’s worse is after a day of thinking about it and the nasty words they said about the staff (it was really disgusting), the patient deleted their own review and social media post asking their friends and family (most of which live overseas) to leave fake negative reviews. Still, many of the fake reviews they solicited remain on the client’s profile and all we can do is explain to future readers that these were left by someone who was never a patient.
3. A Fake Employee Causes a Ruckus
A few years back a construction / remodeling industry client of ours Facebook Page and Google My Business exploded with negative reviews. We quickly performed an investigation which included driving to their office to work with their staff that handled the booking and invoicing for jobs. Turns out, none of the names on any of the reviews or locations they claimed, lined up with any work they had performed recently.
We reported all of these as fake reviews assuming it was a negative review attack by an unscrupulous competitor. Then we sought to contact each individual who left a review, many who seemed like legitimate people. What we uncovered was that someone, likely a competitor, had created a fake Facebook profile. After a few months of liking and sharing posts this person then suddenly claimed to work for the client in “sales” (not a position they have) and began posting on sites like Craigslist and in Facebook Groups / Marketplace selling one-off construction and remodeling work. He didn’t charge any fees but booked up jobs and then just disappeared into the night.
Appalled, we filed a police report with the local Police Department about a possible scammer and let people know on social media. We reached out to each person we could contact one by one and most of them accepted our explanation and deleted their nasty reviews, some even booked an estimate appointment and became customers. Eventually, all of the fake reviews on Facebook were removed by the reviewers or by Facebook who never replied to our reports but appears to have taken them seriously. Over on Google Maps / Google My Business however, many of the reviews remained. Slowly Google appears to have taken them down or the users removed their own over the years. Today 1 nasty review from this period still remains. That user has not posted any other reviews since this time and the only other 2 reviews they have made both have responses from companies pointing out the person was never a customer. Our current theory is that this one profile, and possibly others in this attack, are actually well crafted fake profiles used by a negative SEO services provider to leave bad reviews to harm competitors of their paying clients.
3 years is a long time but that review is still stuck in “Decision Pending” as well and there is little we could do to escalate this to Google, Facebook could have helped us by sending an email / messenger notice when they took down Jimmy’s review on their site but they did not.
4. Angry People on Social Media Review a Business
We have 4 negative reviews on our Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business, i.e. Google Maps). All of them are fraudulent reviews made by non-customers, not even people who called to talk to us about services.
The oldest one dates back several years to about 3 years ago. I am still completely uncertain why this person left a review for our business but assume something I (Joe Youngblood) personally said or did upset her on social media. It appears to be a woman who lives in the Seattle, WA area – an area we do not provide SEO services in. She also works as a “Production Team Member at Jack in the Box” according to her LinkedIn profile (see below) a fact which we verified via her employer while trying to determine if this was a real person or a profile created solely to leave fake reviews. Not only did she grace our business with a fraudulent negative review but she also claims we were “over priced”. While Finorina declined to speak to us or our legal team about this fake review, oddly her manager at Jack in the Box agreed to a brief interview and told me “Maybe you deserve it for being a jerk” before hanging up. Our legal counsel at the time thought we could file a suit against her and win, but I declined and instead thought some day Google would remove this fake review and sent Finorina well wishes in her future endeavors offering SEO and Marketing advice should she ever need it.
For several years we didn’t get any more fake negative reviews from angry people but this year (2024) we have gotten 3 from two different users. The reasoning? I banned them for spamming or peddling scams on Reddit.
I take a little time each day to help keep scammers and spammers out of various communities on the social media website Reddit and use my full real name while doing so. I do this to help young entrepreneurs who are looking for advice have a better chance at finding quality insights since Reddit’s business communities tend to be a feeding ground for scammers and use my real name so they can look me up and see that I could be a trustworthy source. Typically the communities I take over as head moderator or volunteer for are ones that were overrun by spammers previously and are either in the business / marketing industries or related to Texas in some way. This work has barely gone noticed by anyone for several years, but at the very start of this year on New Year’s Eve one Redditor in particular took ire to being banned for harassing and attacking other users in the comments and posted a new fake negative review for our agency in retaliation. It turns out this was because that user was banned by the Reddit Admins (i.e. the people who work at Reddit itself) for harassing others.
There is a little good news here. Within hours of us reporting this fake negative review, at just minutes before the new year, Google emailed us saying it was removed. It was a joyous evening filled with good spirits until I woke up in the morning and discovered the review was still live – the user had made a slight edit and Google made it live again. If you guessed that it is now stuck in “Decision Pending” you are a winner. No future flagging or reports of this outside of an escalation will do anything, even though Google already admitted it was fake.
This person had previously mostly reviewed businesses in the Baton Rouge, LA and Biloxi, MS areas, again regions we do not offer services in. Nor does this person, whose full name is not shown on Google Maps, appear to work as a business owner or marketer who would be in need of our services. When we replied and pointed this out so anyone seeing this horrific review could see instantly it was a fake, the user made their Google Maps profile private and accused our company of stalking him.
Not only did Alex W. leave this nasty fake review on Google within minutes of the user “red_stick_figure” being temporarily banned by Reddit Admins for harassing other users but that user also immediately torched his Reddit account deleting all posts about Louisiana and even a post in a subreddit for what appears to be a book or story the user was working on. By the time I realized what was happening I took action to screenshot his account and realized that user “Red_Stick_Figure” had left behind at least one helpful clue he was Alex – two comments in both /r/BatonRouge and /r/Louisiana
Note: That in our response to Mr. Alex we pointed out that he appeared to frequent Covington, Louisiana and on Reddit he talks as if he lives in Baton Rouge. Covington is quite close to Baton Rouge at roughly the same distance as Fort Worth is to Dallas. While I am extremely unfamiliar with both cities having never lived in or visited either for any reason, it makes sense he would show interest in both locations. While this might make sense to us in the USA it probably does not make much sense to someone overseas attempting to determine the validity of a review.
Finally, we have a third person who left 2 negative reviews with the same name from 2 different Google accounts. For similar reasons this person left these negative reviews because I banned him in a subreddit where he was trying to run grift in a typical Reddit scammer fashion. In this typical grift they start off by claiming to have made some large or decent chunk of money and will give away their secret for free, ultimately they are hoping to hook several suckers to sell them a pre-built website or ebook or some stolen copyrighted / malware laced virtual product. The user posted the exact same message in multiple subreddits using multiple user names, as well a gigantic red flag that it was a scam. The content was even worse however, as the user recommended that entrepreneurs start an ecommerce website where they used a top competitors brand name for their homepage and all of their product names (but only in the title tag) then to buy PBN links (i.e. paid blog network links, a violation of Google’s guidelines) to these pages with the competitor’s brand name and product names. The goal being to siphon away branded traffic to a page that looks confusingly similar to the competitors and money money from it. A nasty blackhat ‘trick’ that would lead anyone who fell for it likely heavily demoted or blacklisted on Google not to mention opening them up for a lawsuit for IP infringement.
When this user was banned they became irate and posted 2 fraudulent negative reviews on our agency business profile. The person who left those reviews is one Mr. Anfkit Srivastava a resident of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh in India. Not only do we not typically service clients outside of the USA but we do not service clients anywhere in India as a matter of choice since we do not have staff there nor I believe our work would benefit a business located there since my team and I are located mostly in Texas and the rest across the US and Canada.
Update: prior to publishing this article we experimented with having Mr. Ankit’s review taken down via the escalation system and it failed at which point I (Joe Youngblood) posted a thread about it on X. Google staff reached out quickly and eventually a Google Business Profile staffer reached out to let me know they were re-examining the case. As of midnight central time Saturday the 16th of March 2024 this review appears to have been removed from our profile. While I am thankful for this, crafting a lengthy social media post about a blatantly fake review from a person in a country over 9,000 miles away should not be the acceptable methodology for having a fake negative review removed by Google. As shown here and in that thread, there were numerous red flags that this review was fake the largest being that the same person using the same exact name under a different Google profile posted a fake rating within minutes of this fake review.
As usual we replied letting users who see this fake review know that we did not work with this person and their claims are false. After which the user edited their fake review to make it even worse. Then, in an ongoing discussion on Reddit, made multiple threats to leave more fake negative reviews unless I unbanned him and offered an apology.
How Google Helps Encourage More Fake Negative Reviews
1. Slow Action and Only Removing Some Reviews Helps Fraudsters, Not Business Owners
The extremely slow process of making a decision on *some* of the fake negative reviews reported means that would be fraudsters only have to make more fake negative reviews than the amount they want to stick on a competitor or a business they have some other disagreement with but have never been a customer of.
2. Easily Discovered Loopholes in Guidelines
The reporting process only allows a business owner or their managers or other customers to report reviews based on very specific guidelines. Fraudsters clearly know these rules and work to make some of their fake reviews sound legitimate in order to make their fraudulent claims stick and cause the harm it is intended to. Look at the Finorina Bokuku and the Frozen Radical examples above. Both of these are 100% verifiable fake reviews but both worked in some way to make the review sound legitimate. Google’s outsourced staff instead of dealing with them leaves them up. We can tell that common people seem to have figured this out too, not just blackhat SEO vendors, look at the medical office example. We know those were all family and friends leaving fake reviews – some trying to make it sound like they were patients instead of leaving a review based on their friend being upset. Alex also does not appear to be an SEO insider or overseas blackhat vendor but also appears to have figure out how convince Google to keep a review live.
3. Decision Pending Causes More Harm Than Good
When reported and in the “Decision Pending” phase the negative reviews are still shown on the business’s profile. If you’re a review fraudster and you realize this, you would leave as many fraudulent negative reviews as possible knowing it will cause short-term harm.
4. Google Only Appears to Consider the Text of the Review Itself, Not the Context
There is no logical filter of reviews whatsoever. A reviewer in India who Google knows has never even been to the USA being able to leave a scathing fraudulent review of a business there is an extremely low likelihood they ever had a business interaction with is abhorrent. Of course as more would-be fraudsters discover this loophole they gladly abuse it at their leisure.
What Google Can Do Better to Discourage Fake Negative Reviews and Negate Their Impact on Small Businesses
1. Use AI or other Logical Systems to Understand Fake Review Patterns in a More Human Way
Use that AI they are so proud of (or just simple if/then) to detect scathing negative reviews that might be fake. Parameters could include things like “recently been present in the same country or region”, “has positively reviewed similar businesses in the past”, “username or ip address doesn’t exactly match a user that just left a review for the same business”, “edited their review immediately following the owner’s response to make it worse”, “review left well after a business has closed for the day”, etc… It seems blatantly clear that Google has no such advanced detection for fraudulent negative reviews since they can linger for such extremely long periods of time no matter how many times they are reported or what owners say / prove in the responses.
2. Take the Owners Side First, Then Use Staff to Validate Later
Side with the owners first, investigate later. Google could easily side with a business owner, at least up front. Take down reported fraudulent negative (and positive) reviews reported by a profile owner or manager and then have humans review those take downs for legitimacy. If there’s to be a “Decision Pending” phase, it shouldn’t cause harm to a small business for the several months to 3-years+ it can take to review it. Certainly this might be abused, but again logic could prevail here (see above) and if the two combine to show a review might be fake take it down.
3. Extra Evidence Should Be Encouraged, Not Discouraged
Allow business owners or managers to submit extra evidence and make a case for why a specific review is fraudulent. In the “Manage your Google Business reviews” tool (which you can find here in case you didn’t know it existed: https://support.google.com/business/workflow/9945796?hl=en) Business owners / managers should be able to add extra evidence beyond 1 upload. Fake negative reviews can be complex with users using a real name on Google and a fake name via email or social media to try and blackmail or extort a business. Sometimes they even use fake names on Google too. As is, Google appears to discourage extra evidence and our own experiences with this escalation process have been less than ideal showing either a lack of training or intelligence by Google’s team charged with evaluating these (but that is for another post).
4. Speed the Process Up, Slow Down the Damage to Businesses
This is of course the easy part. It shouldn’t take 3-years to review a fraudulent review report. It shouldn’t take 3-days. I assume the scale of such reports is mind boggling, but it should move very fast. If Google’s human teams are not capable of it, then just take down all reported reviews until they are reviewed by a human. Similar to the above, the speed of this system is part of the reason it proliferates so many fake reviews and grows the underbelly of fake reviews.
5. Use Multiple Data Points from Interactions With a Specific User
If more than one business owner replies to a user’s reviews telling them they have no records of such a client name, it should be a massive red flag for Google. In our cases above this would only remove one such review but at scale that could represent tens of thousand of fake negative reviews that are harming small businesses.
6. Don’t Change Your Mind Easily Google
If a review is taken down by Google’s team it should not be taken live again just because the user edited it. Users like Alex W and Ankit above have discovered that posting fake reviews might lead to a review getting erased, but if they edit their reviews afterwards it appears to come right back and all future reports get stuck in “Decision Pending” with the review live. Nefarious actors learning this means they can abuse it to cause harm at will, which you can see in both cases appears to be their intent.
7. Automatically Escalate Owner / Manager Responses to Flagged Reviews
When an owner or manager replies to a reported review, it should get bumped way up in the system. Typically this response will hold clues to whether or not the review is real or fake. As we show in multiple reviews above, a simple human clicking a link or noticing a Google user is not located anywhere near the business would bring down 6 of our fake reviews at least, or nearly half of them. At scale this simple adjustment would help small businesses earn millions more in revenue from new customers.
8. Create a Third-Party Extra-Legal Process
Create a process for third-party mediators that businesses could grant access to their recent client bookings / invoices so they can authenticate if a specific reviewer is legitimately a customer or not. Give the business owner the power to request this type of extra review and create a process to work with third-parties certified to do this type of work. If the mediator authenticates to Google that a reviewer is legitimately NOT a client the review would come down instantly. As is thanks to Section 230, there is little legally that can be done in many cases for fake reviews. Google developing a process to allow this to be hashed out creates something fair and equitable for all.
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