Can You Delete A Bad Google Review?: Here’s How To Manage Google Reviews

Receiving negative reviews can be mentally exhausting, but it is a part of every business that can not be avoided. No matter how perfectly you have established your business, some people will always be dissatisfied with that.

Negative reviews are of two types: genuine ones and fake ones that are intentionally added to harm your business reputation. No matter what, the fact here is that Google reviews play a major role in influencing the purchasing decision of a customer. They also determine your business ranking on Google, which controls your online visibility.

Negative Google reviews are one of the biggest concerns of business owners. Now the question is "Can you delete a bad Google review?". Unfortunately, no, but you can surely manage Google reviews wisely.

In this article, we have shared some useful ways to manage Google reviews that will help you save your business reputation even if you receive bad reviews.

Can you delete a bad google review?

There is no way to delete a Google review that you receive from a customer when it is already posted. Only the reviewer holds the right to edit or delete it. However, you can manage such reviews smartly to keep your reputation unaffected online. Discover some effective tips on how to manage your Google reviews in our next segment.

How to manage Google reviews on your business profile?

Here's what you can do to manage bad Google reviews:

• You can report a review if it is fake and goes against Google's content policy.
• Use WordPress plugins to filter out Google business reviews.
• Handle negative reviews responsibly by answering and showing your interest to solve the issue to prove that you care.

These are the most effective ways to manage Google reviews wisely so that the negative ones do not harm your business image and online visibility.

Can negative Google reviews hurt your business?

Google reviews, in many ways, shape up your audience's perception about your brand, based on which they determine whether to purchase or not. So negative Google reviews do have the potential to hurt your business.

You can read our previous blog on how do Google reviews impact your business to understand this clearly.

Business owners want to remove negative reviews knowing how it my affect their reputation or mislead customers. Removing a review is not possible, but you can manage Google reviews by responding humbly or reporting them.

Here's how different bad reviews hurt our business:

• Fake reviews based on no real life experience confuse customers particularly the first time buyers, making them unnecessarily doubtful about your business.
• Negative reviews that are displayed at the top can even overshadow multiple positive ones that you have received.
• Rude comments including personal attacks make your profile look unprofessional.
• Multiple negative reviews directly affect your site SEO as Google considers reviews as an important factor for ranking.

What happens when a Google review violates Google's content policies?

Google supports only genuine reviews, even if they are negative, but the scenario changes if a review violates its content policies. Business owners can not delete bad reviews, but Google can if it detects spam, abusive, or fake reviews.

Google takes down reviews in the following situations:

• When a review is fake and not based on genuine customer experience.
• Use of derogatory language, delivering heat speech with threats etc. 
• Reviews posted by competitors to malign your business.
• Sense of harassment and personal attacks against you.
• Reviews containing harmful links or dangerous content.

Negative reviews that Google allows include:

• Customer feedback based on genuine experience about product or service quality, pricing, staff behavior etc.
• Negative reviews that do not violate Google's content policy.
• Low star ratings without textual feedback.
• Client opinions you might not agree with or find unfair.

How to report a Google review?

You can report a specific Google review on your Google business profile as a part of managing Google reviews. If you find it offensive, fake, spam-like, or breaks Google's policies, you can report it to get it removed by Google.

Here are the steps that you need to take to do the same:

• Find your business profile on Google by simply typing my business on Google search after logging in to your account.
• You will get your profile at the top of the search result in which you need to click on the "view profile" option.
• The section named "your business on Google" will appear where you can read your reviews, edit profile, handle bookings and do more.
• Click on the "read reviews" button to go to the reviews section. Here you will get all the reviews that you have received on your business profile.
• Go to the specific Google review that you want to report. Then click on the report icon present at the right side of the comment.
• Once you report a comment, you will be asked "why are you reporting this review"?
• Make sure to select the most relevant answer. Google will most likely to remove the review if you select a valid and relevant answer as the reason.
• Then click on "Send Report" to submit your report request.

Following these steps, you can easily report an unwanted Google review on your Google business profile.

What happens after reporting a review?

Once you successfully report a review, Google sends you an email that it has received your report request, and it will scrutinize it further to check the validation of the claim.

Then you need to wait till it shares any update on the same. It usually takes a few days or weeks for Google to review the comment and check if there is spam or something that violates Google's content policy.

To track the status of your report request, you can go to the "reviews management" option. This displays all the Google reviews that are currently under process.

If Google finds it inappropriate or goes against their rule, it will delete the comment and notify you. On the other hand, if nothing wrong is found, then that particular review will be visible on your profile.  

Wrapping up

As there is no definite way to delete a bad Google review, you need to manage Google reviews wisely. For example, reporting a comment or answering humbly to address the real issue and rectify them. Google reviews are crucial to build a positive brand reputation online. So make sure you keep an eye on the reviews you get and manage negative Google reviews in the right way.