Fake Google Reviews: How to Limit the Damage
Fake Google Reviews: If you’re a small business, negative reviews on Google can be especially devastating, and you can’t afford to ignore a bad Google review as your potential customers will be viewing this and making decisions based on it of whether or not to deal with you.
If you haven’t been paying attention to your Google reviews, it’s time to wake up and take the wheel. If you don’t have time for reputation management, well, that’s what we are here for so get in touch and we will help you ensure that your company has the best online reputation possible.
This article shows you how to respond to reviews (good and bad). Below we show you how to report a fake review to Google.
There are few things more frustrating than someone tainting your business’s reputation, especially if they didn’t do business with you and are pretending they did. That’s called a fake negative review and fake Google reviews can harm your online reputation!
The good news is however: You can ask Google to remove fake Google reviews.
It’s not as easy as simply clicking “remove,” but you do have the ability to remove any reviews that violate Google’s policies for leaving reviews. That includes the removal of fake reviews from people who never did business with you. There are a few different ways to do this.
Firstly, check all your company records, CRM etc. to ensure that it is indeed a fake review. Once you’ve ascertained this, there are a couple of ways to try and get it removed:
How to Flag and Report Fake Google Reviews
There are a couple of ways to get rid of those pesky fake reviews.
Go to the review on Google Maps. Click on the three vertical dots in the top right of the review (see image below), and then click “Report Review”.
Select the reason (if it is a competitor or someone who has an axe to grind with you personally for whatever reason) the reason will be ‘SPAM’ i.e. Review is from a bot, a fake account or contains ads and promotions. Click ‘Send Report’ and you’re done.
NB: DO NOT CHOOSE THIS UNLESS YOU ARE SURE IT IS FAKE. Google will penalise you if you have an excess of reviews that you are flagging and they turn out to be legitimate.
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