Did you receive a nice little mail from removals@google today?
It's essentially a massive wall of text with many paragraphs and numbers and details that wants to make you afraid. Very afraid. In fact, so afraid that it wants you to just delete the mail and forget about the whole thing. They do not want you to reply. Because if you do their scheme will not work.
I am talking about getting "flagged" for making "bad" reviews on google. I am sure nobody gets flagged for making good ones, but bad ones are generally bad for business. So business owners want to remove those pesky one to two star reviews. It has taken them some years to figure this out, but some law firms now contact or get contacted by business owners to remove unfavorable reviews. It's a whole new branch in the industry I am sure and it seems to be very effective and lucrative.
The idea is this: have google flag all 1-2 star reviews and say you want to have them removed on the grounds of violation of personal rights. If the reviewer does not respond in 7 days, the negative review can be deleted.
It's disgusting, really. They know that most people will be intimidated by this mail and even threaten that they will be "... enforcing these claims in court." Well screw you. It goes without saying that I always reply to these mails by simply stating that I intended to give a subjective review of my experience. That's the whole point of reviews, right? It's subjective and if it happens to be a negative review, maybe start to improve your business and learn how to handle them.
I get it that there are many revenge reviews that could legitimately hurt a business. But just trying to blanked ban all negative reviews delegitimizes the whole idea of having reviews. I know that my negative reviews have been not trying to hurt the business, but were rather meant as a feedback to the owner to improve their business. The fact that my reviews have been targeted as well (its happened at least 3 times or so), just shows that they are trying to remove all bad vibes.
Well, I hope for the future of reviews (which is probably too late anyway) that more people will reply to these kinds of mails.
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lol
Disclosing the practice and who uses it could hurt those businesses more than the negative reviews.