The 13 Reasons Your Google Reviews Aren't Showing Up

As a business owner, maintaining a credible online reputation for your business is crucial. These google reviews constitute the backbone of a business’s reputation. The issue of Google reviews not showing up can take a huge hit on your business’s reputation and your social proof, which is why it needs instant ratification. There are many reasons which could explain what causes this problem. But you have to understand that some of them might occur in Google's server and there's not much you could do from your side in such cases. But there’s no need to worry, read this blog and find out the best remedies for this situation!

So here is the way you can figure out why are certain Google reviews not showing up:

Review processing

Due to various processing that occurs on Google’s servers, a posted review can take sometimes about 2 to 7 working days to be visible. Google is working on this delay and you can't do much here. Moreover, try to respond to the reviews that are still visible on your business profile to show that you care.

Errors in your Google listing information

There’s always a possibility of various minor errors creeping (could even be a careless mistake from your side)  into your listing information. These errors cause inaccuracy in your GMB information which takes a huge hit on the way Google perceives your business (aka SEO error). 

Not only does this drive your potential future customers away, but also reduces the number of reviews that your business gets. But all you need to do to fix this problem is refresh your GMB listing. Here’s how to do that:

1. Go to the “info” section on your GMB home page.
2. Click on the pencil icon next to the listing’s address.
3. A pop-up icon should show up where you have to wiggle the map a bit and then, allow the marker pin to settle above the correct location.
4. That’s it. Press “Apply” and you’re good to go.

URLs and links in Google reviews

Google’s new review policy restricts people from posting reviews with links and URLs in them. You might get a notification that a customer has posted a new review, but Google will remove such reviews even before they go public. Keep this in mind to get more Google reviews.

To fix this, you’ll need to find a way to contact the reviewer and ask them to edit their review and remove the link/URL. This should update the review and make it visible to the public.

New GMB listing

If you’ve newly set up your business on GMB listing and are wondering why a customer’s google review is not showing up, then here’s the thing - A newly set up business on GMB listing has to have at least 5 Google reviews for them to go visible to the public. Again, all you can do here is to wait until you reach the least number of required reviews. Google will make them visible once you’ve crossed the bare minimum.

Inactive GMB listing

In a state of inactivity for a long time, Google tends to revoke a business’ “verified” status. In other words, if you do not log in to your GMB dashboard for several months, Google removes your business verification. Once revoked, there’s no point in wondering why is my business not showing up on Google Maps.

If this happens, all your reviews will be hidden. Neither you nor your customers will be able to see your business ratings and reviews.

Google always notifies the owner when a business’ verification is revoked. Hence, all you need to do is find that email from Google and open your listing from the link provided inside that mail. This should automatically restore your verification status to “Active”.

Server issues from Google

Although this is rare, there’s still a decent chance for a server outage at Google. This may be a cause for your Google reviews not showing the problem. From a business owner’s perspective, it is absolutely unacceptable.

Once again, there’s not much that can be done in this case. The best way to solve this would be to email Google’s customer support with a link to the review and ask for their feedback. In most cases, this will rectify your problem.

Improper Review Formatting

There are times when your customers might post a review in a format that Google does not accept. In such cases, Google keeps them from going public. You can take a look here to find out review formats that Google considers violations. This is not something that you can correct and the only best solution would be to inform/educate your customers on the best practices to follow.

Spam marked reviews

Inappropriate reviews from your customers get marked as “Spam”. In their significant resolve towards freeing the internet from inappropriate content, Google immediately removes such flagged reviews. 

Google also ensures that any review which violates the policy gets instantly removed. This is not something under your direct control unless you use good reputation management software.

Fake reviews

In a meek effort to boost social proof, brands tend to buy a large number of reviews. These are called fake reviews which go against Google’s review guidelines. Google, in its effort to protect consumers from such companies, flags these reviews as spam. 

In such cases, when caught, Google can suspend the GMB listing of that business. This leads to the removal of such businesses from GMB by deleting everything.

It is best to avoid buying fake reviews. The short-term benefit might seem appealing, but this would lead to the entire deletion of such a business’ Google page. The rough part- customers will get to know this. Therefore, it is advisable to detect and remove fake reviews from the business page.

Deleted reviews

Previously, an option existed to change the privacy of the review’s visibility. However, since this option is no longer supported by Google, any review posted will be public. If a review is not visible, most likely it’s because the author has deleted it already.

Duplicate GMB listing

It might be possible you created two GMB listings for your business by mistake, there’s also a chance of impersonation. Anyhow, with a duplicate listing in place, the reviews that you might have received could have been posted on the duplicate listing. This can cause you to miss out on good reviews and possibly confuse your potential future customers when they make searches.

If this is the case, make sure that you immediately delete the duplicate listing. So, the next time when you think “Hey, some google reviews not showing”, consider checking for a duplicate listing. 

Employee reviews

Google knows the exact author of a review. So, when a current employee or even a former employee posts a review for you, Google will take it down by flagging them as a biased review.

The perfect review

Google is an AI-based company on a mission to be fool-proof. Due to this, Google constantly improves its algorithms in review recognition.

Having said that, Google can decode a review that’s made. An error-free review with 100% grammatical accuracy is seen by Google as a fake review because, let’s be honest, no one focuses on Grammar and sentence formation when writing reviews.

Reviews that you deem valuable might get taken down because of reasons like these. Although, unlikely to happen, the chances are never zero.

Conclusion

In today’s age where word of mouth has transformed into the form of online reviews, seeing reviews disappear can be hard to handle as losing reviews is equivalent to losing potential future customers. Arguably, getting reviews is hard, and seeing those Google reviews not showing up would be heartbreaking. 

BUT, you can avoid most of these problems easily if you use a good review management tool.

Using a good review management tool can automate collecting reviews from your customers and also act as a platform to provide customer support.

This way, you get to post positive reviews on Google and privately read negative reviews, thus, sorting out the issue.

Freshreview can do all these for you.