How to Delete Negative Reviews and Outdated Content on Google

How to Remove Negative Reviews

First, let’s get one thing out of the way, you can outright delete a review if you were the one who wrote it. But you cannot remove negative reviews if someone else wrote it, even if the reviewer is pointing out your establishment. 

There are obvious reasons for not being able to remove negative reviews outright from silencing free speech to giving too much control to either the company or the reviewer. Of course, this does not mean that you cannot remove the negative content at all.

You can delete a review by using the dispute feature that Google has provided, where representatives will look over your review and see if the claim is valid. But this is only relevant to the reviews you haven’t written.

Deleting Your Review

• Let’s start with the most common case, deleting your review. Sometimes the place or management can change drastically, and it no longer reflects your previous review. So you want to delete it because they really took your review more constructively. Here is how you can do it from your computer browser:
  • Enter Google Maps
  • Once in, go to the menu tab
    • You can access the menu tab by clicking the three lines on the top left
  • From there, go into “your contributions” and from there go into “reviews.”
  • Click the three dots right next to your review and then delete it from there.

Deleting a Customer’s Review

The second most likely turn of events is that a customer has left a review, and you want to delete it. Now, sometimes, a customer can leave reviews that don’t, in any way, reflect the business. Or, customers can sometimes leave reviews that are in no way constructive or add any information. So for customers simply using your platform to vent, you will have to flag their review.

Now lucky for you, there are actually two ways that you can do this. One way is through your phone, and the second is through your computer browser. We will list both of them here.

Using My Business (Desktop)

•  Open your phone and go to the “My Businesses” app powered by Google
•   Sign in, and select the listing of your branch (if you have multiple ones)
•   Open the “Menu” tab and go to reviews in the menu tab

Using My Business (Phone)

• Open the MyBusiness app
• Go to the customers’ section and move to reviews
• Find the review you are looking for a flag it

Using Google Maps

• Go to maps and find your listing.
• Find the review you want to flag.
• Go-to options on the review and flag it as inappropriate

Now a major problem with flagging reviews is that they take a while before they can go down. Moreover, these reviews on Google don’t reflect various third-party reviews that you cannot take down at all. Other than that, Google also does its own routinely checks of any spam reviews.

Removing Outdated Content

• Now other than reviews, the content that you upload on your site can also get outdated. But even after you delete it, it’ll still be visible in Google search results. Well, there is a simple way to remove this outdated content.
  • Go to the removal of the outdated content page on Google
  • From there enter the URL for the pace you want to remove
  • Select request removal

  From there, you may get two different options.
  A prompt may appear telling you that the current page hasn’t been deleted yet, so you may delete that first. Second, you will get a prompt for how the content isn’t present, and you can proceed with the removal. These steps are crucial in maintaining your online brand reputation.