Getting, answering, reporting and understanding Google reviews. Every article answers one question, checked against Google’s own help pages, with the date.
Stars appear in three different places on Google and only one of them comes from your reviews: the rating beside your business on Search and Maps. The other two, beside a website link and under an ad, are separate systems.
Find out first whether the review exists at all. Two screens settle that: the customer’s own list of reviews in Google Maps, and the “Read reviews” list on your Business Profile. Everything after that follows from which of the two it is on.
Ordering negative reviews against another business is fake engagement under Google’s content policy, and Google says the action it takes on an account ranges from suspending its privileges to ending it. If it has been done to you, the route is the report button on each review, and the extortion form when a demand for money comes with it.
The Google review policy is the Maps user generated content policy, and it binds the person writing the review and the business receiving it alike. It says what a review may contain, forbids paid, incentivised and off topic reviews, and Google removes content that breaks it and can restrict the account or the profile behind it.
Yes, you can: a review belongs to the Google Account that wrote it, and you delete it in Google Maps under “Your contributions”, then “Reviews”, then “More” and “Delete review”. Nobody else can take it down for you, not the business, and not a service that offers to.
There is nothing to generate: Google builds the review link for you and keeps it inside your own Business Profile, under “Read Reviews” and then “Get more reviews”, where a button marked “Copy” puts it on your clipboard. A generator site cannot make a better link than that one, and most of them want something from you.
No. Your star rating is one number on one profile, and your online reputation is everything a stranger can find out about you: reviews on other services, directory entries, forum threads, articles, photographs, and whatever an assistant repeats when somebody asks about you.
Because asking is a real job that nobody has been given, paid for or shown how to do, and many people are simply embarrassed to ask a stranger for a favour. You may pay your own member of staff for the work of asking; you may not pay the customer for the review, and Google has rules about both.
There is no number, and the useful measure is not the count but the proportion: what a bad week does to your rating depends on how many honest ratings already stand behind it. Google’s score is the average of all published ratings, so a wave moves a long record far less than a short one.
Check it from outside your own head: more than one wording of the query, a browser you are not signed in to, and a device that is not yours. Your own browser has been taught what you like, so the page you see is not the page a customer sees.