Dealing With Ex-Employee Reviews? Here's What You Do
New Google Guideline Forbid Former Employees From Posting Negative Reviews.
It’s not new to hear marketers and business owners complain about how Google My Business rules are frequently equivocal. On this issue, I concur. It is easy to read and misinterpret a guideline. I have discovered that the way to understanding the rules is through time and experience.
Seeing what Google will and won't follow-up on can give knowledge into what things seem of more value to them. It's widely received and thought that former employers’ reviews were an infringement of Google My Business terms and conditions. My assumptions were based on the following sections of their review policy page.
a) “Ensure that your business listings reviews, or those left on visited businesses are honest portrayals of the encounters of the clients. The ones that are false may be removed.” This is the main rule at the core of Google’s rules, which is the reason the organization usually discards reviews written by your pals under your instructions (note that anyone that does a review doesn’t necessarily have to be a client. However, they need to have the intentions of a client- for instance, if a person reviews you negatively merely because you never got back to them, that would still be viewed as an actual review since they intended to transact business with you and you displayed poor customer relations).
b) Conflict of interest: The value of reviews is based on their unbiased and honesty. Do not review your own business or that of your employer. I understood these policies to mean that reviews made by either past or current employees were against Google’s policies. After all, employees cannot have honest reviews since they are not clients.
However, earlier this year, when I was trying to help entrepreneurs remove negative reviews from their former employees, I realized that Google only prohibited current employees from reviewing their current workplace. I have tried to think of the reason why Google came up with this policy, but I can’t seem to find an answer that makes sense to me. A recent example of this was when an employer tried to remove a review by a former employee."It is true that I used to work at (omitted). My opinion of the company is still the same as when I used to work there.” She proceeds to explain that her opinion is similar to that of a customer and compares her former workplace to a rival company or competitor. In a different example, an ex-employee made negative remarks about the business owner of a preschool and went on to review the preschool. The ex-employee said that the reason the staff cannot stay at the preschool for long is that of the failure of the owner to run the preschool well. I fail to understand how Google considers such reviews as a client’s experience.
In the above examples, Google did not remove the reviews since current employees did not make them. Google finally reviewed its policies on 14th December 2017 which means that reviews by former employees can eventually be withdrawn. The new rules which used to be under Google My Business are currently in the Maps help center. The rules forbid current and former employees from posting negative reviews. Doing so is considered as a conflict of interest. If you were ever affected by such horrifying experiences where you got negative reviews from former employees, it is high time you take action and contact Google My Business. Request them to remove such reviews. Click here to get the 1-2-3 steps how to flag the bad reviews. This time around, you will probably get the right response.
Source: Search Engine Land
