Google Reviews Not Showing Up – Why and How to Fix It 2023

As a business owner, the more google reviews you have, the better you may feel. There’s no doubt, and you should feel proud. When someone goes to your Google my business page, you want it to glow, showing your positive reviews. The more reviews you have, the more trust you can gain.

While this is true – and you should be proud of all of your positive google reviews – try to focus on growing your business, too, and don’t get caught up if you’re missing one or two reviews. As long as your Google Listing on my business page clearly shows your brand is authentic and trustworthy, you are all set.

Don’t worry too much about negative reviews. Just aim to get more positive reviews. If you do have some inauthentic or spam reviews, Google can help you resolve any reviews posted that are not legit. Every business will have a few negative reviews; they all can’t be positive, take the negative feedback and use it to improve your business brand. The positive will outweigh the negative.

Your Business Listing is Inactive

Google may update your business’ listing when you edit your business information, following Google My Business guidelines. Once an update is sent to your personal Google account , it will go through a verification process before appearing in search results. This could lead to your listing being inactive for a bit.

In the past, Google would crawl sites hourly to pull reviews from them regularly. But, they have recently changed their algorithm to only visit sites on said page once a month. This has led to some honest reviews going unseen on the site. Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to get more frequent reviews.

Duplicated Business Listing

When Google sees duplicate content, it gets confusing because how does it know what page has the “real” information? Each link with the same content in different formats counts as duplicate content. Google also doesn’t count either URL when calculating its ranking. Combining these two aspects means that your listings rank half of what they would if you got rid of any copies or duplicate listings. Google probably is stricter about this in local search because there’s just so much spam out there, it’s incredibly easy to be the one site with duplicate content.

Google My Business Listing Too New

If your business account on Google is too new, this could be why you are missing reviews. As you are awaiting your first few reviews, you can expect Google to take more time verifying the authenticity and accuracy of the google reviews.

If you’re navigating the complexities of online reviews, our experts are here to assist. Don’t hesitate to reach out— call us or visit our contact page for personalized support and guidance.

Don’t worry, it’s usually just the first five business reviews that will take the longest to publish. Usually, the first four people to write reviews for your business will receive the most thorough checks, creating such a lag in publication time. This is a good thing, though; it means Google prides itself in authentic reviews, meaning customers can rely on the authenticity of each review, leading more customers to you.

The Review is Flagged as Fake

One of the most common reasons why Google Reviews may not show up is that reviewers can flag them as “fake.” It can become challenging to determine what the fake reviews are in this case. The “flags” reviewers can assign to a review, either good or bad, is what will currently show up in the index at that time.

Those that are false, of course, would never make it into the index. Some “fake” reviews will not be flagged as such and show up in the index. The review posted above is just one of a few examples of how “fake reviews” are generally flagged, uncovered, and dropped from the index.

Unfortunately, aggressive competitors can mark your legitimate reviews as spam, but once it goes through moderation and review, it should be okay; it’s a hassle, but it’s part of having your business public and could happen anywhere, unfortunately.

The Review Could be Flagged for Other Reasons

There are times you may notice that a Google review won’t show up for other reasons, and this could be due to bots, fake reviews left, and non-authentic reviews. Google has automatic filters set in place to prevent these reviews from being published. Some of the common problems for flagged reviews are:

Link in the review

According to Google policy, they don’t allow links in post reviews and google reviews.

Review from a biased source

Google frowns upon -and will delete- reviews from a current or former employee. Reviews must be from customers only.

Profanity in the review

Even the harshest reviews won’t have profanity because Google’s review policy prohibits this type of language from being published on business reviews.

Suspicions of a paid review

Another strict thing with the Google review policy is receiving compensation for a review. Google will delete any reviews that they feel were paid for.

Third-Party Site Review

If you search different businesses on Google, you will see that some of them will have a Google knowledge box with a section called “reviews from the web.” This is small section that will embed reviews from different non-Google websites with online reviews. If one of the sites in that featured box removes the reviews of your business, the area of the knowledge box will be removed from your Google review listing.

This extra spot on your Google business profile review page is not entirely indebted to Google. So, if you have an issue and it gets removed, it may just be because the non-Google site decided to take off your google business review too; that’s when you would want to contact that site specifically.

The User Removed Their Review

Sometimes, users will remove their google reviews, which is one of the main reasons you may find a google review not showing up. This could be due to various factors. Maybe you had a negative review from this person, but the issue got cleared up, so they deleted it; you could ask them if they could repost a review that explains their positive experience.

Another reason may be that they could have had a positive experience left a review, but something changed their minds. In this case, they may decide to retract their positive feedback.

The third reason you may notice a review is missing is that you review data on your google business page; the reviewer’s google profile could have been filtered or terminated for whatever reason. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do to fix this if it’s the reason.

Google Bugs and Other Issues

Just like anything, Google users can encounter errors, bugs, and issues on their end that cause you to wonder,” Why are my google reviews not showing?”

Sometimes, things can happen to the powerful Google machine and a bug may appear that messes the entire process up. Other times a minor issue occurs that makes sense and is fixed promptly.

Usually, Google support is on top of all the issues they encounter. Most of the time, the issues will always get resolved on their own and quite fast. However, some examples of bugs in the past that weren’t so quick to resolve were:

The Pandemic

This is a major issue that is affecting everyone worldwide -yes, even our precious Google- Think about it, they have some of their staff either out sick, or maybe they lost some staff due to “The Great Resignation,” which means they have fewer people to fix major bugs. The COVID-19 pandemic put Google into maintenance mode. They even had to stop Google reviews for about a month because they didn’t have enough staff to hand in the monitoring and review process.

This has been restored since then, but it’s just to give you an idea of what can happen at any given time. Of course, when you are receiving positive reviews, you want them posted as soon as the customer clicks “publish,” but sometimes we have to remember the staff at Google are human; they could be dealing with numerous jobs for one person because of the low number of staff.

The Google Kansas Bug

Data gets messed up sometimes for everyone, Google included. The geographic location can get misconstrued, and the review process can become more complex to fix. If you go on your Google Business Profile listing and notice your business location is not accurate, be sure to contact Google support to have it fixed promptly. Not only does this affect reviews, but it affects your Google maps if someone is trying to get to your physical business.

So, How Can You Solve Missing Google Reviews?

As you’re checking your business listings and noticed some reviews are missing that were there before, what can you do to fix the issue? After all, when your potential customers perform a Google search, they will be more apt to engage with your business if you have several positive Google reviews.

The first thing you can do is diagnose what is causing the issue. Some issues can easily get solved by talking to Google, but some of the problems you can fix on your own in minutes. If you can figure out the problem yourself, you can figure out how to troubleshoot it quickly.

If you rather, you can contact Google to help resolve the issue. It’s up to you and your comfort with technological-related problems.

Be sure you verify all of your information and activity on your business profile and all business listings. All of the information should be accurate. Fix any information that doesn’t match up with your business like the description, the location, etc.

Sometimes the information gets messed up, but sometimes it’s on Google, and it could be out-of-date issues that they can resolve fast.

You can expect to water a few days or weeks for a review to show up. However, also keep in mind that even if a customer said they left a positive review, they might not have gotten around to it yet; this happens more than you think.

If all of your information is correct on your google business profiles, listings, and google my business page, the next step would be to contact the support center for Google to fix any issues on their end.

Struggling to get your reviews published? Give us a call or fill out our contact form, and we’ll work with you to ensure your Google My Business profile is in top shape.

Wrapping it Up

When a customer goes on google or a search engine to type in either your business or something related to your industry to find a product or service like yours, it’s important they see google reviews. However, this doesn’t mean you should get stuck on missing one or two reviews. As long as you have a handful of reviews reflecting your effective product or service and your impeccable customer service, your business can still thrive while you are working on that one missing review.

Instead of focusing too much on missing a review, your business online reputation can grow more by trying to gain new customers and letting them leave some positive reviews.

Ready to enhance your online presence? Connect with us today—our team is eager to help you manage your reviews and build a stellar online reputation. Call us or visit our contact page now.

Have some negative reviews showing up in Google reviews? Check out our 5 tips for dealing with them here.