I’m a jerk.
Someone wrote a nice Google+ review on my business page in 2012, and I didn’t thank him until today.
‘Course, it would have helped if I knew about the review. It had been filtered for over 2 years. It wasn’t there a week ago. I saw it for the first time only a few hours ago. (And I only stumbled across it when doing some research for my State of Search talk.)
To add insult to injury, the review was from no less than David Mihm.
Why was it filtered?
My theory is that David’s review fell victim to Google’s Great Review Purge of 2012. As you may recall, Google was filtering reviews left and right. For a time, they were out-Yelping Yelp.
Google eventually relaxed the filter, at the beginning of 2013. Many reviewers that had been filtered came back to life, and new, post-2012 reviews weren’t filtered nearly as often. Good news, for the most part.
Turns out that was only the beginning of the 180-flip. Throughout 2013 Google pushed customers to leave reviews and pushed business owners to ask for them. This past July, Google even OK’d pseudonyms.
The other reviews people kindly posted on my page – the ones that seemed to stick initially – were all written after 2012. So that fits with my theory.
What surprised me is just how bad Google was at playing God with reviews.
Even 2 years ago, David had written 40+ reviews, over a period of 4-5 years. Not a newbie reviewer by any means.
Plus, all the reviews on my page were written spontaneously. As much as I appreciate the kind words, I’ve never asked anyone to review me on Google.
Why did the review only show up now?
That’s what puzzles me. Google’s filters loosened over 20 months ago, at which time many reviews came back to life (indeed, they never really go away).
True, some reviews never seem come back, but usually those are the real stinkers (and even many of those stay up). Why didn’t this review come back?
It can’t be that my page had to get a certain number of reviews for all the oldies but goodies to return: More than 6 months passed between when my most-recent review was written and when David’s got unfiltered.
Nothing else happened recently in terms of Local Visibility System reviews, except for the very nice Yelp review I got a few weeks ago.
So I’m stumped, unless there’s such a thing as a 27 Club for reviews.
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Any theories?
Have you noticed old reviews resurface recently?
For that matter, have you noticed anything odd with Google+ reviews lately?
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