Google Maps declares war on fake reviews

The administration of the Google Maps service has begun to combat business pages that publish fake reviews – their visitors receive appropriate notifications. Google has decided to introduce restrictions against business profiles that violate the Fake Engagement policy: fake reviews are removed from pages, the ability to post new ones is blocked, and a message is displayed that fake reviews have been removed from this page.

Image source: Rubaitul Azad / unsplash.com

Restrictions on business profiles began rolling out in the UK portion of the platform this year, and in September Google updated its support page to warn that the new rules would now apply globally. But for now, the warnings are only being shown to users in the UK.

According to Google’s policy, reviews on the Maps platform “must reflect an authentic experience about a location or business.” Business page owners are prohibited from posting content that does not sufficiently “accurately represent the location or product in question” or was created by the author for compensation. The Google Maps administration also intends to look for reviews aimed at manipulating ratings – they are published by multiple accounts, using emulators, modified operating systems or other methods that “simulate genuine actions.”

The company hasn’t said how it intends to determine if reviews violate its rules, but the threat of users seeing a warning about review fraud may be enough to deter careless businesses from trying to manipulate ratings. People may simply refuse to visit such suspicious places.