User experienced a "review bomb" with 1-star fake reviews from non-customers. Google support was unhelpful, and they had to resort to third-party services to remove some of them. The process was frustrating and damaging to their business, indicating a need for a more effective and reliable removal system.
round a month ago I started getting 1 star reviews out of nowhere. Ended up with 13 of them before I really started to panic. I run a barbershop, and if you know the industry at all, you know it runs on regulars. These are people I’ve cut for years. My calls started dropping and even my regulars were coming in less, it genuinely scared me. I went through my client records and none of the reviewer names matched anyone I had on records. Everyone who came in seemed happy. I was thinking about it and then it clicked, there’s a new barber who opened up last December around 15 mins from me. His page had so many 5 star reviews and had zero 1 stars, which felt weird asf to me. I had no proof obviously, just a gut feeling. I tried flagging all 13 to Google myself and got nowhere, even with the forum. Spent probably two weeks going back and forth with their support and all of them just stayed up. Eventually I found a few people online offering review removal services. Tried one guy, didn’t work. Second one I hired actually managed to get them taken down, took about a week. Not all 13 though 11 of them are gone and two are still sitting there which is frustrating, but at least the calls are coming back. Still a bit on edge about it honestly. Didn’t realise how fragile things could get over something like this.