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Comment by ghoward | Hacker News Reader

I once wrote a negative review of a business on Google, and it went up, but when I went to look at the business's reviews under my wife's Google account, it was not there. I waited an hour and checked. Then a couple hours and checked. Then a day. It never showed up.

I posted the review under her account and did the same checks for my account. It never showed up.

I do not know why it didn't show up, but I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam.

Edit: Because some commenters did not seem to get the implied message, what I am actually implying is that in this context, or any context, I don't trust Google. I have no evidence of what commenters said I have claimed. (I have not claimed anything; I just said I wouldn't be surprised.)

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I am no google fanboy, but I WOULD be surprised to find such a thing. The reason I would be surprised is history and alignment.

  Google consistently has bad/non existent customer service
  It is famously hard to talk to a google employee when you have a problem
  Google has a history of primarily hiring devs
  Google knows its bread and butter is legitimate results
  Google probably has the largest most experienced anti-SEO team on the earth
  Google seems to want to stay out of the press
  Google maps reviews are a very major competitive moat against other maps
  Google is supported by ads, but AFAIK does not actively seek customers
  Google does not do delivery
  Google's money maker is getting information, maps is a major input
  Maps is a secondary business able to be subsidized by search ad revenue

On the counter side

  Inflated reviews/advantaged reviews would make ad customers happy
  Selling position is potentially extremely profitable

I just don't see it. It's not googles MO. It's yelps MO. That's why I use google maps as my primary tool for finding whats good.

What I wouldn't be surprised by is google systemically limiting negative reviews. In my experience A yelp 3.5 would be a 4 on google maps. A yelp 1 or 2 would be a 3 on google maps. 4 would be 4.5 on google maps. Google maps numbers are definitely inflated, but once you understand the relative scale it's just as good as pre-corrupt Yelp.

This is a great reply to my post and answers me better than any of the others I have seen thus far.

Any curse words or something that a system might flag?

No, I actually do not swear at all.

I think there's an assumption here that needs to be addressed, and that's that Google functions as a single entity with consistent and coherent policies and actions across all its arms.

Just because something is not in the best interest of Google overall or long term down not mean a small fiefdom is doing something different for their own self interest, even if only temporarily until it is eventually discovered and corrected.

For example, almost all your statements about Google above are incorrect for at least one business they've been involved for, for at least part of the time they've been in it. Often it's easy for find multiple counter examples.

As a whole, Google follows those statements you made, but for any specific business they are in I wouldn't make a blind wager about it.

Google knows its bread and butter is legitimate results

Google's bread and butter is controlling the stream of data so that people accept its results are legitimate. That's not quite the same thing. Essentially Google does well when people trust Google implicitly and don't question whether or not its results are actually good. For a very long time Google returned W3Schools as the top result for most HTML and CSS queries. These days MDN is top and W3Schools is second. W3Schools is not the second most relevant link for a search of a CSS property name or an HTML tag. I do wonder if they're second because they display a prominent Google AdSense ad at the top of every page.

The main thing about Google Search results is that they're much better than their competition. That's all you can really say for them though. The results aren't anywhere near as good as they were 15 years ago, where a query genuinely returned the best, most relevant results. You could predict which site would be top for a query domain you knew well. Google are still dining out on that reputation but they don't really deserve it any more.

Google Business (business.google.com) which is used for managing a business on Google/Google Maps has surprisingly pretty good customer support (for Google :) ). There is an option to request help and when you decline all the automated answers it's possible to send a text to a real person. Up to now all requests to remove reviews, photos, or previous/old business listings have been resolved in 2-3 business days.

In order to remove a review on Google Business it needs to be fraudulent or outdated - e.g. the business has been remodeled and the review doesn't apply anymore. But the list has over 10 different categories on why a review can be removed. So in reality I would say it's probably possible to remove any review. The customer for Google is the business, not the user as Google is promoting GoogleAds to local businesses so they need to keep them "happy" to increase Ad spend.

Interesting! Definitely not something I've read about often.

Yes. This is an understanding I buy:

  Algorithmic/Systemic upward review pressure: easily removed/prevented reviews.
  Alignment problem: money comes from business, not user.

This is a satisfying understanding of why things are the way they are.

I've found it almost impossible to remove bad reviews on Google. We've had several drive-by 1 star reviews from people in different countries that have zero relation to our business.

Did you use the report functionality or did you go through support? If the review has no relation to your business it’s a clear violation of the review policies and you can report it. For us nothing happened after reporting such reviews and only after contacting support they got removed.

It's even hard to get 5 * reviews removed. They aren't allowed for consumer finance co's in Canada but we still couldn't get them removed.

Discalaimer: I used to work on the Google team that worked on anti-abuse for comments/ratings.

>> So in reality I would say it's probably possible to remove any review

No, it is possible to get something removed if it violates Googles policies that are designed to make sure reviews are on topic and legitimate.

>> The customer for Google is the business, not the user as Google is promoting GoogleAds to local businesses so they need to keep them "happy" to increase Ad spend.

Not true at all. I have personally told many clients who spent XXX million dollars with Google that reviews can not be touched if they follow Google policies. The customer is not the business, it is the users who trust these reviews. Google can do just fine without monetizing the reviews but will not survive without user trust. It will take 2 hours to become a global headline if Google did something like this. And if this was true no business would every have bad reviews.

Not saying you are not honest, but for others it is hard to verify a throwaway account. Or trust, for that matter, if all comments posted so far are made fiercely defending Google practices.

Suppose you left Google for a google-affiliated Reputation agency, then your disclaimer would be correct, but your comments might be fishy. No way to know. In a general sense I wonder how many of such agencies operate on HN to give positive twists to discussions that may hurt brand image.

>Google knows its bread and butter is legitimate results

My feeling is that google have paid only lip service to that for more than a decade now? Ads are now much, much more important due to lack of meaningful search competition.

Remember ads used to be clearly separate from search results? That's a long time ago. Google make a load of money selling $company the first hit for the search string with $company_name which is an ad so $company_competition can't steal their search result. Then take the cash when the person searching for $company clicks the first link that comes up when they search for company. That's closer to protection rackets and stand-over tactics than focus on a bread-and-butter of legit search results.

That's just one example of modern google. Remember "I'm feeling lucky?" Quite the contrast nowadays isn't it. Unrecognizably different in the google approach. But also it's difficult to take a legitimate result focus seriously if you've ever done a google search on a phone. Try it.

Google are really happy to get any bidding war for advertising content going and have such a dominant position they don't care at all what you think about it. This particular suggestion of what they might be doing? I dunno. It'll probably leak if it's true. It is completely and totally consistent with modern google.

Yep, today when I type anything into the search box, most of the time the result is highly "SEO"ed result by media and agencies, unlike the old days

Around ‘08 or ‘09 they declared defeat in the Great Webspam War and decided webspam could rank highly as long as it didn’t get too nasty. The whole web (as far as searches results will tell you) promptly turned into webspam. I imagine this, along with their plainly-evil inlining of ads with search results within a couple years of that, made their profit arrow go up-and-to-the-right so hard that no-one who opposed those moves was paid any mind.

Indenting your text formats it as code, making it unteadable.

Sorry about that. I don't think hacker news allows you to format lists, but I wanted a list. It increases the readability on desktop, but destroys it on mobile.

Yeah I just don't see this being a thing either. If Google allowed businesses to pay to moderate (i.e. censor) their own reviews at their own will then that destroys any legitimacy in the reviews of a business, eliminating any value of Google Maps reviews to the end-customer and killing the product.

I understand this works in theory, but people still use Yelp, right?

Do they? I've never even heard it mentioned before other than in reference to controversies around them being dodgy. Maybe it's just not popular in my locale, but I've never heard of anyone using it or recommending it. By contrast I've used Google Maps reviews, and know of other people using it a lot

Yelp gave up on international reviews to focus on the US explicitly because they couldn't do internationalization. Google maps works quite well internationally except in Korea and China.

Here is my reading of your situation:

1) You posted a review which presumably got flagged as being spam/low-quality (maybe an automated system flagged it for having ALL CAPS or curse words, or who knows what).

2) You posted the same review on a different account, which now is flagged as double spam because now it looks like you are operating a sock-puppet account.

I think my version of events sounds a lot more likely than yours. If your thing was true, then you could sign up right now with your own fake business and find the page where you can remove reviews of your own business. Since no one has shown this to happen, one can only assume that it doesn't happen.

I think Google/Amazon etc try to mostly remove fake reviews, and that probably just catches reviewers who are giving 1 star angry-rants as "spam".

Mine probably got flagged, but not because of curse words or ALL CAPS because, as far as I remember, it didn't have either of them.

Edit: I just checked, and the name of the business, which I quoted in my review, is ALL CAPS, so maybe that was it?

Very likely :)

"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Given how well known other unscrupulous review service tactics are (eg, yelp) I doubt this would be the case. It's hard to keep such practices secret when they involve attempting to extract money from a large number of businesses. Plus Google seems to be reasonably honest about labeling (even if very subtly) when things are sponsored ads or not.

I would find it far more likely that this is simply a symptom of something Google is well known for doing: Content moderation through algorithms/ML which mostly works but still messes up a lot. Either the wording of the review hit some metric on its own, or the business already was detected as being review bombed and your review got caught in the cleanup crossfire. Posting it twice probably didn't help, as that would further convince an algorithm it's probably not legitimate.

I agree. That's why I said "I wouldn't be surprised if..."

I intentionally did not make a concrete claim.

Hmm, that's interesting. If I was writing a review moderation algorithm, it would leave only one copy up if there were multiple substantially identical reviews. Those are likely to be written by bots that mutate a common review and post, or even if some entity circulates a "review" to its crew of minions who write fake reviews based on that template.

I'd also write it to remove reviews written by a single account if the reviews across diverse products are substantially similar.

How does "stupidity" explain that the poster's account showed the review but someone else's account didn't?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning

Right, but you don't accidentally shadow-ban someone, you first have to create the whole system to do so... So they weren't 'stupid'.

It obviously was intentional to lie to the user. We're just discussing the line at which intentional lies for selfish reasons can be called malicious.

> but you don't accidentally shadow-ban someone

Have you considered when the shadow-ban is triggered by an automated moderation system based on heuristics or ML which Google is known to use prolifically across their product range?

But not "accidental" because they had to create and maintain it. Stupid would be them intending but failing to make post visible.

They intentionally created a system which resulted in a user being unintentionally shadow-banned. Creating a shadow-banning system isn't malicious. Creating a shadow-banning system that accidentally shadow-bans legitimate users is pretty obviously more a case of stupidity than malice. Just because they created the system intentionally, doesn't mean unintended behaviours in the system are intentional malice

The maliciousness comes in with the self-interest. They're lying to you because they make more money when you don't know to complain.

They aren't like baby killers or anything, but they are certainly prioritizing their wallet over your consumer good and even safety.

Imagine if HN charged to post and shadow-banned users.

Its almost certainly an anti spam system. The system marked the review as spam, for whatever reason. And it doesn't publish the results. The system doesn't tell you this because otherwise the first thing you will do is keep trying again in different ways until it doesn't tell you it was marked as spam.

Google drops reviews for a few known reasons. When a location gets negative coverage in the news, thousands of negative reviews from people who have never visited the location. Google then drops the reviews since review bombing is not useful.

Who knows why OPs comment was flagged, but its easy to see how this happens without a big conspiracy going on.

Yes, in fact, if there's some delay in processing reviews through the anti-spam system, the OP might have triggered the failure themselves by then posting the exact same review under another (their wife's) account. If I'm writing an anti-spam system, duplicate reviews from different accounts are like the most obvious heuristic imaginable.

That saying has it limits, most pf these excuses are sounding very improbable, like: "oh i didnt mean to rob the place, i found the door unlocked and walked in to give it a good clean."

When motive, money and power align,yet we still accept weak ass excuses?

I see your Hanlon's Razor, and I raise you Hanlon's Handgun of mine:

"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by systemic incentives promoting malice."

I'm not sure what makes Google so different that it should be exempt from general trends around reviews. Businesses have their interest aligned here: removing negative reviews and faking positive reviews are beneficial to each individually, and can't be directly weaponized against competition. Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest; regular users will not replace Google Maps with OSM over a review issue, while a business might want to stop paying Google if they get bad experience on the marketing front.

> Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest

Have you actually thought about this at all? Why on earth would ANYONE bother reading reviews that they know to be categorically fraudulent? Without keeping the reviews honest, at least to a degree that the general public considers them honest and legitimate, Google Maps Reviews becomes worthless and a dead product. Fake reviews are a very real threat to their product's value and Google arguably has very good strong incentives to keep reviews honest so people keep using them.

Why does anyone read Yelp reviews? They're gamed, and also used to extort businesses. Why does anyone read Glassdoor reviews? They're completely gamed by the employers[0], and the company itself recently pivoted into brand management - which translates into fake reviews being their core product now. Why does anyone read Amazon/eBay reviews? They're gamed too! Why does anyone read reviews on random small e-commerce sites? Those often aren't even reviews, they just look like them!

It's because most people don't pay attention and didn't figure out yet that on-line reviews in general are worthless, thoroughly gamed bullshit. Those who did figure it out - they don't stop using Yelp/Glassdoor/Amazon/eBay/Google Maps anyway, because those services still offer enough value to customers compensate for broken reviews.

So if regular users will be there either way, and manipulating reviews - or allowing them to be easily manipulated - increases retention of paying customers (businesses), which way the incentives blow?

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24789865

> I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews

There is no way to do this that I can find documentation of on the public internet. You'd think if it were possible, someone would have written a howto guide. Personally, I'm deeply skeptical that any such mechanism exists. The revenue it would generate would be negligible and the potential for reputation loss significant.

> There is no way to do this that I can find documentation of on the public internet.

And you used Google search to look for it, right? ...

(Kidding.)

There is probably a button for business owner to complain about a review, for example in case of competitor bombing? Since nothing on google can be appealed this button is as good as removal of reviews at will

And if your affiliation to this business is based on ad spend then well...

Again, I can't find even a hint of how to do this on the internet. If there is a way, you'd expect it to be documented given what surely must be widespread interest in the subject. Basically what we have here is an entirely unsubstantiated and unlikely accusation. (Unlikely because the incentives simply are not aligned.)

Saying "I wouldn't be surprised if..." is not an accusation, unless you count the implied "I don't trust Google" as an accusation.

If you said of someone, "I wouldn't be surprised if they were a thief," that would rightly be viewed as a pseudo-accusation of thievery or other dishonesty. It doesn't literally mean the same thing as "he is a thief," but saying you believe someone has a decent chance of being a thief is still a type of accusation -- one of dishonesty and distrust. If the belief is unjustified, then I think it's fair to call it an unsubstantiated accusation.

But if that doesn't work for you, pretend I called it an unsubstantiated implication instead. Either way, I think we all understood what the OP meant, and we all understood what I meant in my response. So at least we are communicating.

We are sort of communicating. I _am_ the OP. And I only meant it as "I don't trust Google."

I'll let you decide if that implication is unsubstantiated or not.

You should just say that, then. If I don't trust someone, that doesn't mean it's OK to go around and imply that they do some absurd malicious thing I have absolutely no evidence they actually do. It's fine not to trust them. Spreading unsubstantiated rumors and implications is not fine.

I just wanted to mention that I adore the way you articulated and called out everything that was going on here.

You go out each day and pigeons have shat (pooped) on your car.

Today you go out and there's a pigeon sitting on the branch over your car, you scare it away.

Your friend is like "what did you do that for, you have no evidence this pigeon poops on cars!".

Your [asdfasgasdgasdg] position is "this pigeon might be fine" the OP's position appears to be [or at least, mine is] "pigeons are probably going to poop on my car". You're saying his position is insubstantiated ...

It's the difference between treating Google as unique, and treating them as a member of a class of businesses. It's not insubstantiated, it's just a different form of substantiation. If all advertising businesses the OP has dealt with before were underhanded then your position looks to them like "today is unique, maybe the sun won't rise".

tl;dr you can substantiate a position based on general behaviours of items in a class, it's not necessarily wrong, and can be just a different model.

But there are no popular review websites that allow business owners to pay to remove negative reviews. So the inductive approach you advocate favors my position.

I don’t know how they did it, but a doctor surgery near me (UK) had a large number of negative reviews up for several years. About one week ago, I looked and they now have one single 5 star review. So, anecdotally, there is at least some way to get the reviews removed.

As a business owner, you only need to claim the review is fraudulant and that will usually get it removed.

In theory a review hoster is supposed to evaluate claims and act on reasonable ones. In practice review hosters are terrified of getting sued and will take down reviews easily.

I suspect most local businesses hire "reputation fixing" firms to actually do this dirty work for them.

I helped a couple of small businesses set up maps business listings a few years back. One was going great for years then in about 3-4 days got a bunch of fraudulent bad reviews from a disgruntled ex exployee. We tried for months to remove them, every single way possible but were never able to. In the end we had to nuke the whole Google business listing, which wasn't easy either.

You can reply though, IIRC. A good response to a negative review is a massive plus to me.

Aside: somehow businesses get moved - even major ones like a local McDo got moved to the wrong location. Takes weeks for corrections from when I report them. I really can't understand that one. This too could be a killer for a small business, getting shifted to the wrong location.

In a similar vein, I'm forever having to report our opening hours and things to Facebook as we don't have any (small craft shop, open by arrangement) and people insist on adding some.

It's all really weirdly handled. I suppose it's the presence of untrustworthy parties in such disclosures though Google should have enough trust signals to weight users input.

> review hosters are terrified of getting sued

I wish Google would be terrified of getting sued, but we both know this is not gonna happen.

My friend is a business owner.

She received couple one-star reviews on google maps from customers she never had (she’s a real estate developer, real estate is expensive, she doesn’t have many customers).

Wasn’t able to do anything about them.

I don't know how to square this claim with the plethora of businesses with many negative reviews on both Google and Yelp. If it were this easy, you'd think everyone would be doing it. Probably someone would have written a blog post describing how to do so. I can find out how to buy gmail accounts on Google, but I can't find out how to remove business reviews. Maybe the claim is just that most small businesses are very honest?

In any case, the scenario you're describing is decidedly not pay-for-play on Google's part, and thus doesn't really impinge on my response to OP.

I think almost all SME owners would assume they'd have to pay (Yelp model), rather than just be able to lie and say it's fraud. Also who is going to advertise after the fact that they falsely had reviews removed - risking getting dumped by Google?

I'll assume Google's reviews are at least somewhat likely to be biased (either way!) until reason to believe otherwise. The "you don't know the review wasn't posted by a dog" position.

I don't really care if you assume the reviews are biased. I assume that all review websites have some number of fake reviews, and it's unlikely that exactly half of the fake reviews are negative and the other half positive. Therefore all review websites would have some bias vs the ground truth sentiment. My only objection is to baseless accusations of malfeasance.

Absolutely not true. Worked on this team for Google at one point and other than internal systems nothing can get reviews removed. Firms cant do anything, they are just swindling people out of money. Some of them will get fake reviews to try and drown out negative ones but its very short lived.

Yet, reviews can be removed :).

Reviews can be removed if they are shown to violate Google policies. Also, legal action can be taken to remove a review. Google does not write law about what reviews are permanent.

Seems to me that if reputation firms are buying reviews and their effect is "short lived"... then those reviews are getting removed.

I thought the part about "only internal systems" would imply that external parties can not remove reviews. But if not then let me clarify, yes there are anti-abuse mechanisms that can remove reviews. But these are not based on customer complaints or how much they are paying Google for ads, they are based on Googles own internal policies which are designed to make sure the reviews are legitimate.

Kinda like how they handle false copyright claims by not taking down the content, oh wait ... that seems a similar situation in that acting on false content takedown requests doesn't get them [much/any] revenue and provides a relational hit to users (but pleases some huge customers, no doubt).

Someone has given a credible mechanism for take down, report it as fraudulent. I find it highly likely that if you have a paying B2B relationship - eg you're a high paying advertising client, that you'd be able to report "frauds" and get immediate action.

But if course I've wouldn't know, and presumably Google would have NDAs for businesses in any special access (it would also be detrimental to the business to disclose it and risk losing the special access).

All we've really got is our TrustRank RTM on our part experiences with Google and similar corps.

Throwaway for obvious reasons:

While working for a big vacation rental company in Portland not named Airbnb, they rolled out a review update that still added negative reviews to the 5 star score, but hid the context.

A rental may have a lowered star rating but the only story you’d see was praise.

Business is not about logic like engineering. It’s about growing margins, and that is entirely emotional.

I stayed in a hotel in Rotterdam one time (5-6 years ago). The entrance had a ramp for wheelchairs/prams. A bunch of a*holes parked their luxury cars blocking that ramp. On the second morning the cars were still there I called the concierge out to see this. Then I took a picture of him, of the cars, and their plates and told him I will call the Police in 5mins (yes I am THAT kind of guy). In two minutes all cars were gone never to reappear (I stayed there 10 days). I left a 1star review to the hotel, under my name, with photos of the cars (not their plates) and a comment about blocking the ramp, hotel staff was informed multiple times and didn't react.

I went to Rotterdam again 1 year ago. My review was still there. A half-baked apology was under my comment. I walked by, no cars were blocking the ramps. I call that a win.

The same happened to me. The negative review shows up when i'm signed in but it did not affect the rating (number of stars) of the business.

Basically, it's just me and the owner of the business that sees the review. The negative review I gave the scammy business doesn't show up when I sign out.

Do you have any idea how difficult it would be for a random dinky business to bribe an engineer at Google? There are businesses that are literally making bank for Google and still can't get in touch with a human being at Google when their Google account gets locked, app gets removed from the Play Store, etc.

What probably happened is that the business had friends and family members report your review which was removed by an automated system.

The reason I am hesitant to believe that is because of the fact that the review _never_ showed up, not even briefly.

However, you could still be right.

yeah but what about yext and friends getting special access for their clients?

disclaimer: Google employee. Views my own.

You can not pay to change Google reviews. Period. And the theories of "you dont know whats happening in all parts" is not true because I looked at detailed numbers myself and other than legal processes, everything was clearly visible.

If anything Google has a clearly different org and we often told very highly paying customers that even if they were paying us hundreds of millions a year that does not change our policies. One of the luxuries of being Google scale I guess.

Google gets a lot of (potentially justified) criticism on Hackernews but this conspiracy that Google lets businesses pay for reviews is plain stupid.

Note that I didn't say Google let businesses pay for reviews; all I said was that "I wouldn't be surprised" if Google let businesses do the spam filtering and flag reviews.

What I really meant is that I don't trust Google in this situation. That lack of trust still exists and is not a conspiracy.

And I _would_ be surprised if Google actually did the right thing here.

So all of your statements basically say that you think Google reviews are pay to play because you dont trust them to do something right. Sure, you have the right to that opinion.

I can pay external farms to spawn new favorable reviews though, and Google won't do shit.

I'm not sure if Google does it indirectly, but they definitely do this practice with their "partners" (probably just a convenient way to shift liability of more shady practices) to review partners like Trustpilot (I get their sales calls all the time, so I know what benefits they offer to businesses in terms of "moderating" reviews).

> but I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam.

Do you have any evidence of this claim? Have you seen businesses be able to do that? Surely, the hundreds of thousands of businesses on Google, one of them has talked about the ability to remove reviews.

Yeah agreed. Do they think Google just has some checkout button to block bad reviews for $299.

Of course not, you need to be logged in to a google account and solve a captcha ;)

Nope. No evidence.

That's why I said that "I would not be surprised if..." which doesn't make a concrete claim. To me, it means, "I don't know, but it seems plausible in my limited experience."

I am making no claim other than pure speculation, and I know it.

Edit: typo.

It's highly possible that Google has some concept of freezing reviews while it investigates something. Maybe that business was caught buying reviews and so Google stopped allowing new ones for a while. Or it reported it was getting spammed. Or some other situation like that.

This is a very good alternative explanation. Thank you.

>It's highly possible that Google has some concept of freezing reviews while it investigates something

I doubt google is investigating each bad review they receive, though, so it happening to both accounts is odd.

> I wouldn't be surprised if the business had been able to pay money to Google to be able to check reviews before they went live and mark them as spam.

I would be really surprised, as such a scheme existing without being exposed by now seems highly unlikely, and it would completely undermine the value of Google Maps reviews once everyone knows businesses can freely curate their reviews. Why would you bother looking up reviews for a business if you already knew any legitimate negative ones would be censored out? You wouldn't. Nobody would. Reviews on Google Maps would be discontinued by now if it were ever the case.

I've had the exact same experience. Several days later I got an email from Google saying the review was now live, but it's still not there. Other reviews that I wrote years ago are hidden, too.

If the business is an Adwords customer then there is a conflict of interest.

Try leaving a positive review from another account.

it's like commenting on hackernews for me. which you will never hear about.

It's not, because:

(1) Anyone can easily see why you're banned, if they want to turn 'showdead' on in their profile and look at https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=trollski ;

(2) Anyone can easily get an answer about why they're banned on HN, simply by asking us;

(3) Anyone can easily get themselves unbanned on HN if they want to use the site in the intended spirit as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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