Ask HN: All my Google reviews are rants from costumers that I've never seen

18 points by rafaelturk ↗ HN
All my Google reviews are rants from costumers that I've never seen, and not related with my business, what should I do?

15 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] thread
Report each review as irrelevant?
Google lacks a clear feedback form or option to report "fake reviews on my profile by competitors."
I mean, they don't have that _exact_ reason, but they have "Conflict of interest". Here's the reasons shown to me I can report with https://elixi.re/i/yf61g.jpg .

Can always get friends to report the fake reviews too. I've seen other people get legit one star reviews removed. I've even had my own real one star reviews removed

Well, if you have any competitors, pay to leave fake reviews on their Google listings :P
Is your business named something confusing? Is the marked location wrong?

Normal businesses don't have this issue, so I would suspect that your listing is really confusing if the majority of your reviews are for a different business than yours.

> Normal businesses don't have this issue

Reviews having become utterly useless has been thoroughly documented. A look at the review-industry should tell you enough.

Every business has this issue.

Maybe you just didn't recognize them in their costume.
For the ESL speakers for whom the joke when over their head:

Costumer: a person who wears costumes

Customer: a person patronizing a place of business

Costumers MAKE costumes. Then, of course, the costume-buyers come into the costumers', become customers, and wear their costumes out of the costumer's shop.
Become COSTUMED customers**
With as little details as you have provided, it's extremely hard to give you a helpful answer. Maybe share a link so people can see the reviews themselves?
maybe OP is afraid of getting more irrelevant reviews from sharing a link
Ask the to say when they were at your business and why they interacted with on the comments. At least readers will see it.
First, need to gather more info. For example, we in Ukraine few years ago seen huge number of fake reviewers from India, few times more than Ukrainian market, and in most cases just prohibit Indian IPs was enough to resolve.
In order to avoid future retaliation, whenever I leave a bad review for a business, I use an email address that doesn’t link back to me.