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 One of the best ways to advertise your business for free is through Google Places. Google Places allows business owners to provide information about their business as well as maintain their visibility online. Among the information you can add to your business through Google Places include hours of business, products or services offered, special events such as sales, photos and videos, as well as general facts about your business. Google Places also enable customers to leave reviews about your business where future clients can view them. 

Positive and Negative Reviews

Every business owner aims to get positive reviews about their business. However, no matter how well you manage your business, it is inevitable that you will receive a negative review or two from your customers. Negative reviews aren’t actually that bad for business as long as these as from legitimate clients. The only problem is if you find fake reviews posted about your business, which is where knowing how to remove reviews from Google Places can come in handy.  Fake reviews are more common than you think and posting of these reviews are usually meant to ruin the credibility of your company. 

Approach the Situation Calmly

Negative reviews from legitimate customers should always be acknowledged politely even if you disagree with it. Google Places doesn’t allow you to remove the review yourself but you can easily respond to the person who posted the review. Simply apologize for whatever complaints the customer may have and reassure him or her that you will implement certain measures to avoid the same incident from occurring. You want to be honest to your customer and appear professional so always be polite when responding to negative reviews. If you believe that the review is not from a legitimate customer, you can flag it as spam and file a complaint with the website publisher. You can state your side why you believe the review is false and it is up to the publisher if he or she will remove the review. If the review is obviously false or is in violation of the website’s terms and conditions, the review will immediately be deleted.

The Legal Approach

If you want to take a more aggressive approach to remove reviews from Google Places, this is only possible if you have evidence that the negative review is a fake one that can be considered defamatory. Google-owned websites such as Google Places will not respond to your requests of removing content from their websites without a legal court order as they are protected under the law the same as they are also bound to protect the privacy of their users. Once the court finds the content of the review to be fake and defamatory, you can provide Google with a copy of the court ruling so that they can remove the review.

 What is Google Doing to Remedy the Situation?

With numerous requests every year from business owners to remove reviews from Google Places, Google has revised their policy on leaving reviews and has also set up a screening system for reviews posted. Although there have been complaints from users about some reviews not showing up, Google assures them that this is part of the measures being taken to ensure only legitimate and useful reviews appear on Google Places.

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