As some of you may know, Germany has one of the shittiest “defamation” code that allows any business owner to simply delete the reviews they don’t like. For a long time this had made Google Maps ranking useless: a rating of 4.9 could mean the store is really good, or it’s deleting all the bad reviews.
Not anymore.
Now if you click through all the way to the Reviews tab, Maps will tell you how many reviews the business owner has deleted in the past year.
So when choosing where to have lunch, don’t forget to check this tab. Also check the places you usually go: restaurants, stores, car mechanics. Chances are if they’re doing this you should look somewhere else.
On the other hand, a business owner has no other tool against review bombing except this. In a village near me a barber shop was review bombed by neo-nazis due to their support for refugees. They removed the fake reviews successfully but from time to time this Nazi scum remembers and review bomb them again. This goes on since at least 2020.
To be clear, this isn’t about reporting reviews to Google in general, which is possible in any country. This is specifically about the fast-tracked “defamation” process in Germany.
And they are not removing this process, they are merely adding transparency.
well, if the review says “this owner is shit because they support refugees”, that in itself says something.
That’s not really how it works with bad faith review bombing. When they’re just actively trying to tank the business by any means possible, it’ll be just actual lies. “Terrible haircut,” “Rats everywhere,” “Cut me and I was covered in blood,” etc.