Is Google Deleting Anonymous Reviews? Local SEO Experts Dive into Millions of Reviews to Find Out
Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a lot of chatter on local blogs about Google’s intention to remove anonymous reviews, either pulling the stars out of the rating out of the local knowledge panel or going as far as deleting the reviews altogether.
The Chatmeter dashboard pulls in reviews, media, listings, and more from over 1.5 million storefronts every day. Our Customer Success Team monitors thousands of local reviews with our customers every day so we wanted to use our platform to help get to the bottom of this rumor.
We had lots of questions:
- Has Google started to delete anonymous reviews?
- Will this impact the overall star ratings?
- Would this make a difference for larger, enterprise brands?
- Is this fake news?
We dug deep, and our team has been monitoring the reviews of 20 large retail and restaurant brands for the past seven days to find out the truth. Is this a rumor? What is happening to anonymous reviews?
Overall, there has been little to no movement on anonymous reviews by Google. All but one brand still had 100% of the anonymous reviews present in their review detail and the rating score had not dropped. One brand had three anonymous reviews deleted but across such a large amount of reviews, this did not impact their star rating at all.
Our opinion? As of today, the answer is False.
We will continue to monitor this and keep you posted if we see this change in anonymous reviews. You can count on Chatmeter to know the score for your online reputation.
Have you seen a change with your brand? Share with us your findings below.