It’s no secret that Google reviews can make or break a company.
Whether you’re a startup looking to establish yourself as a reputable company or a well-established company with a large existing customer base, Google reviews can play a huge role in how your company is presented online.
Here is our guide to whether employees can leave Google reviews, both positive and negative.
Can Employees Leave Google Reviews?
Technically speaking, anybody can leave a Google review of a company, whether they are a customer or employee. But just because you technically can leave a review, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Google wants you to.
In fact, an employee writing a review for the business they currently work at (or worked at in the past) appears to fall under the “Conflict of Interest” section of Google’s Prohibited and Restricted Content guidelines.
So the short answer is that Google does not want employees to write reviews for the businesses they work at.
Other review sites may have a different take on this, but even so: if you are an employee and you feel compelled to post a review about the business you work at on any review site it’s generally good practice to disclose that you’re an employee, regardless of the nature of your review. This can actually help build even more trust amongst readers of these reviews.
The good news for business owners is that they don’t need to have their employees post Google reviews for their businesses just to increase their rating and volume of reviews, as there are much easier and effective ways to do it (more on this below).
What Happens When An Employee Leaves A Negative Review?
Here’s the thing – negative reviews aren’t always the worst thing. Sometimes, a negative review might be exactly what the company needs to develop and change in order to prevent similar negative reviews.
It all comes down to how the company deals with the negative reviews.
Google reviews written by employees won’t be automatically deleted by the review site before they’re uploaded. It’s not common for Google to delete any reviews written by employees unless those reviews are manually reported or somehow trigger Google’s review filtering algorithm.
If an employee has left a negative Google review that presents the company in a bad and biased light, you cannot simply delete the review. Instead, businesses can flag reviews as “inappropriate”, which will then act as a case for Google to investigate.
However, if an employee leaves a negative review on an employee-only site such as Glassdoor, there’s not much you can do about it. This is because employees have every right to leave negative reviews in a place designed for future employees.
How To Get More Google Reviews
ReputationStacker is an automated service that helps businesses get more reviews on Google and any other site you want to get reviews on.
The service works like this: You simply enter your customers’ email addresses or phone numbers into our secure system. That’s all you have to do.
ReputationStacker then automatically sends customers an email or text message with a link to your business’s review funnel, where customers are asked to rate their experience with your service. This is a single-question survey that takes only seconds, and it directs your customers to the review sites of your choice to post a review.
By encouraging customers to leave a review (and following up with them automatically if they don’t), ReputationStacker works to boost not only the reputation of a business, but also the profitability of it.
Customers are far more likely to use a service with frequent positive online reviews – in fact, 80% of potential customers are likely to trust online reviews as much as word of mouth from friends and family.
Conclusion
While there’s nothing preventing employees from leaving reviews, it is a violation of Google’s Content Guidelines, so we advise against it… especially when it’s easy to get your actual customers to write reviews using a system like ReputationStacker.
