Well, Google has decided to remove reviews from anonymous users.
So, what are anonymous reviews? – Reviews that had been left by profiles marked “A Google User” are termed as anonymous.
Google has been struggling to keep its reviews authentic for a long time and anonymous users posed a big threat to it. So Google finally decided to remove it, all of them. Many business owners saw a sharp drop in their business ratings and most of the negative reviews & ratings were from anonymous users – which is a sign that either competitors or someone totally unrelated to business were posting it, using anonymity.
When contacted, Google just gave this simple statement: “We do not allow anonymous reviews today and we’ve removed legacy anonymous reviews.”
If you have lost reviews that were NOT from “A Google User”, possible reasons could be:
- Having paid for or incentivized reviews, either directly or via an unethical marketer.
- Getting too many reviews at once.
- URLs, prohibited language, or other objectionable content in the body of reviews.
- Reviewing yourself, or having employees (past or present) do so.
- Reviews were left from same IP address.
- The use of review strategies/software that prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive reviews.
- Any other violation of Google’s review guidelines.Since reviews and rating affect your business rankings in Google, it’s crucial to keep them authentic. One way to do this is to use our proprietary review widget.
It’s a small piece of code which is placed on your website and helps you get positive reviews on Google, Yelp and Facebook. In addition, it helps to filter out negative reviews too, thus ensuring positive experience to website users.