They claim businesses cannot remove reviews, so why would your honest and legitimate reviews be hidden? If you know the answer, let me know. I recently found out that almost half of my reviews were hidden. I updated one of them to see if that would help, but it doesn’t. I’m still trying to find out why and if Google can reinstate the hidden ones. What use is a review system if not all reviews are displayed? That undermines the reliability of the whole system (or perhaps that’s old news). At least Trustpilot contacts you for proof when the owner of a business claims your review is false. Google Maps just quietly removes it sometime after you posted without you knowing it.
How to find out whether Google Maps is hiding your reviews?
Go to Google Maps and make sure you are logged in. Through the hamburger menu on the left, click on “Your contributions”, then select “Reviews”.
Under the review you want to check, click “Share” and copy the link. Then, open an incognito window (you can also log out, but that is a more tedious process) and paste the link you have copied. If you can see your review, all is clear. If it says “This review is no longer available.”, then you know it is hidden from the public and does not count towards the review count.
The weird thing is that both positive, neutral and negative reviews are hidden. And meanwhile, they keep emailing about my contributions being seen and appreciated by thousands of people. Right… If this isn’t fixed, there will obviously be no more contributions.
In the meantime, I added the more important ones (where people may get scammed) as a photo. Time will tell if these will be visible, but it’s worth a try.
wwwanchi 