I’ve been seeing an increasing amount of frustration in the reddit forums on fake 1 star reviews mainly that businesses are seeing their google my business profiles get hit with fake 1 start reviews. Most likely these are coming from malicious competitors. Regardless of the source of the spam it can for obvious reasons really hurt local businesses.
In this post I’ll give you the steps to remove these 1 star reviews. Let’s dig in.
1. Respond to the Review
Google gives you the option to respond to reviews. I’ve found in many years of dealing with this that the best way is to respond in a way that most people wouldn’t understand. Let me explain:
- Review: “Service was terrible, I hated the lasagna platter” Response: “So sorry! I think you might have a different restaurant though we don’t actually offer any kind of lasagna”.
- Review: “Very disrespectful”, “So sorry for your experience! Who was it you talked to? We’ll flog them and fire them on the spot!”
- Review: “Jim was terrible he said…” Response: “That’s terrible? Who’s Jim? We don’t have an employee with that name but I want to make sure I never go to the business you’ve been to!”
Defending yourself or excusing them publicly makes you look angry and out of control. By using empathy, humor or randomness you are going to help the people who actually read the review to think twice about it. Remember we don’t actually care about the fake person who left the 1 star review, we care about the potential customer reading the review.
To respond to reviews go to google, type in your business name, when it comes up with the listing click on “view all reviews” then if you are logged in you’ll see a response link below the review:
2. Report Review as Fake or Spam
In that same image you can see an icon with an exclamation point in it. This is the report a review button. Click it and you’ll see multiple options for the review reporting:
Make sure you are being as accurate as you can but if it’s a fake review the conflict of interest link is going to be your best bet. You are not able to write any notes on the report so the best you can do is to just submit and wait.
Now here’s the slightly more helpful part. You can have others report the review as well. In fact agencies that offer this as a service such as Raptor, use multiple accounts with different i.p. addresses to report reviews that are fake on our client’s accounts. It’s important that all the accounts you use are legit and that they are in different locations. Additionally make sure you are only reporting on actual fake reviews. I’ve had companies want us to fix their reviews and it turns out they just were providing a terrible service. That of course is not our jam here at Raptor.
3. 1 Star Reviews with No Text
We are seeing issues currently with google not removing some reviews that have 1 star but no text in them. This I don’t think is intentional but is simply a bug on google’s side. You can still report them but until google decides to fix this we’ll have to just wait and hope.
Summary
Getting fake reviews is incredibly frustrating for legit business owners. We have some here at Raptor as well and I can’t tell you how frustrating it is. Hang in there, report the reviews and keep providing the best product or service you can.
