Hi there,
Today I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t trust Google reviews after all the negative reviews I posted in Portugal were reported and therefore deleted.
I always post reviews whether good or bad.
Since I arrived in Porto, I have continued posting reviews based on my experiences as I always have.
The difference is that in Porto I started noticing that my reviews disappeared after posting them.
I asked a friend to post the negative review to the same company to see what would happen and it also disappeared.
A friend from Spain had told me that lately all her reviews had been deleted.
I could not believe it.
But it was true that the negative reviews that I wrote for Remax, MaxVillage, Clínica Luso Espanhola, etc., had disappeared.
I tried to post a one-word review, and the same thing happened, it disappeared.
At the beginning of July, I started posting reviews after a trip and I saw in my review history that there were a lot of evaluations in which it said, “Not published”.
I kept looking at my entire review history and I have almost 1500 contributions. There were tons of reviews showing up as unpublished, even reviews from years ago.
It is that there were even positive reviews that had not been published.
I understood that my account had some type of block because it seemed that most of the reviews did not come to light.
I started “appealing” for every unpublished review, and you can imagine how many I sent.
It seemed that from there a human being was going to check the review to see if it was approved or not.
Here I understood that the review that we post is published automatically and if the owner of the company or business reports it for any reason, Google also automatically deletes it.
In fact, if you search the Internet, you have an endless list of articles and videos that explain how to remove negative reviews from Google Maps.
It is also important to note that Google does not notify you that the other party has reported it and that they have removed it. Therefore, most people do not realize that the review they posted telling their bad experience is not going to be of any use.
Two days after submitting the appeals, I began to receive emails telling me if the review was approved or not. In general, they were all approved. If I had posted the review with both of my accounts, then only one of the two would be approved.
There was a review I posted for Raga Orthodontics in 2021 that I realized had not been published because it was reported and after appealing it was approved. They tried to call me from Raga Orthodontics and then responded to the review saying that I was confused.
There I understood that once you appeal and they approve the review, it seems that the company has no way to remove it again, so they have no choice but to respond. What they should have done from the start.
See the magnitude of the hoax behind the Google reviews. As a user, your review will only appear if it is positive.
Who is going to trust a platform like Google that does nothing but delete reviews?
For as long as I’ve been in the world of customer service, managing negative feedback was sacred.
Even comments on social media must be managed the right way. A decent company would never delete a negative comment or review.
In fact, sometimes I believe a good response from a company more than a negative review/comment.
It is also an opportunity to resolve the situation and to try to keep the customer. If you delete the review, you already make sure that this client will never forgive you in life.
But in Portugal this does not exist. There are no conscious and intelligent practices such as taking care of the customer, providing a good after-sales service, and managing a negative review in the best possible way.
For mediocre companies it is easier to report the review since Google automatically deletes it.
For me in the end it was a matter of honor because what Google does is a shame. I wasted several weeks appealing over and over again for unpublished reviews. Most of them were approved, but at one point Google restricted my account from leaving any more reviews.
As you can see, Google doesn’t like it when you complain and simply violates your freedom of expression by not letting you post more reviews.
The most absurd thing is that after the account was restricted, all my reviews had been deleted and I could not write any more reviews on the platform, I continued to receive daily notifications from Google regarding my reviews.
I made a claim at the European consumer office, and this was the response:
In addition to the falseness of the Google reviews, in Porto I had to change my name and user photo due to the multiple threats I received from the solicitor João Valente, Remax Rubeas and even the lawyer Jaime Roriz.
Learning for those who read me, do not trust, or believe that Google scores are true. Try as far as possible to be guided by other platforms such as Yelp, Trustpilot, Tripadvisor, etc.
After this experience I stopped using almost all Google services.