TAMPA BAY, Fla. — A new study shows people rely more heavily than ever on local business reviews to research their purchases beforehand.
Small business owners said that five-star Google reviews are as good as gold when it comes to growing their operations, but some worry about what the future holds after dozens of their best ones either vanish from their site or never appear.
Nicholas Bissett, who founded My Organic Turf in 2019 with one truck, credits Google reviews for growing his company into a nine-person, seven-truck operation in under four years.
“Google is king. There is no more important metric, really, for a small business than Google," Bissett said. "And you know, our success has really been aligned with our Google reviews.”
Tampa Bankruptcy Attorney Gina Rosato also credits hundreds of 5-star Google reviews for her growing client base.
“They are very important because a lot of people, they just don't know what attorney when they're looking to solve a problem or hire someone," she said.
These entrepreneurs and others who have contacted ABC Action News worry about what the future holds now that dozens of Google reviews have vanished. Rosato estimates she has lost about eighty reviews. Bissett said his business is down 18.
Not only are five-star ratings vanishing, but these owners also said other positive reviews never showed up on their sites. These are not isolated incidents. ABC Action News has heard similar complaints from other small operations.
Google support does not always fix the issue, so we emailed Google's corporate office. We wanted to know why this is happening and asked the internet giant to restore the verified reviews for Rosato and Bissett.
Rosato said an hour after we contacted Google, all of her reviews returned to the site. Bissett confirmed most of her customer reviews returned as well. Google would not say why the reviews were taken down or never posted.
Google provides the following resources and information for anyone who is dealing with a comparable situation:
- Businesses can find more information about reviews and how to report missing reviews here [support.google.com. There are several reasons why reviews may be removed from the page.
- In most cases, missing reviews are removed for policy violations like spam or inappropriate content.
- From our Maps User Contributed Content Policy [support.google.com]:
- Contributions must be based on real experiences and information.
- Deliberately fake content, copied or stolen photos, off-topic reviews, defamatory language, personal attacks, and unnecessary or incorrect content are all in violation of our policy.
- We not only remove policy-violating content from our platform, we also suspend and delete accounts associated with abuse.
- We also encourage people toreport [support.google.com] misleading information, and flagreviews [support.google.com] andinappropriate content [support.google.com] for removal, which helps us keep the information on Maps authentic and reliable.
