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Google has confirmed that its latest efforts to filter out local reviews against its policies and guidelines went too far. Google, over the next few weeks, is working to restore the policy-abiding reviews that were removed by its automated systems as false positives.
Google said, "In the last few weeks, our protections took down more than expected policy abiding reviews from a set of Local Guides. We’ve also closely followed the conversations on Connect around unpublished reviews and we acknowledge that this change has affected a lot of your accounts."
Google added they are now working on an automate fix, saying, "as part of our efforts to resolve this situation, we have launched an update to our protections to fix them. We will also automatically reinstate the policy abiding reviews over the next few weeks if we determine that we made a mistake."
If you do not see your review return within a few weeks you can ask for a human to investigate. Google said, "If your policy abiding reviews were not reinstated and you'd like us to take a look, please submit a request through this form. Please keep in mind that some reviews may remain private if the content violates our policies."
The last I heard of mass reviews being removed was in October 2022 - so I am not sure if this is related to that or if this is limited to just Local Guides?
I've not seen an unusual increase on the forums, so it may be limited to LGs. But the form mentioned has been around for several months; I've forwarded several accounts to use it. It's very helpful if your reviews are not showing and you think there's a specific reason.
— Amy Toman ❄️🎄❄️ (@BubblesUp) February 1, 2023
Forum discussion at Twitter.
