Your online reputation is a big part of your digital business card.
Building a good reputation may take months, or even years. More often than not, it's a long and tiresome process. You can actively try to increase your reputation through surveys, emails, discounts, and so on, or you can be passive and wait for your online fame to grow.
Whichever the case, sometimes, you may stumble upon ill intended internet users. Those are the type of users that give bad or false reviews due to frustration, competitiveness, and all sorts of other "reasons." If you're managing a big company, chances are a few bad reviews won't really stain your reputation. But, if you have a smaller company, those pesky bad reviews could ripple off into something much more damaging.
Take legal action against the reviewer
Luckily for business owners, there are ways to remove those false reviews. However, the process won't always be easy.
One of the best ways to solve such a problem is through legal action. In order to leave a review on Google+, a person must first create an account. This is created by providing a name, a birth date, and a valid e-mail address. Of course, these aren't verified at first, so the account owner could very easily put in a false name or e-mail. However, their IP address can be targeted as well. Although there are cases where false reviews can be given through proxies and other such software, in most cases people use their home PC.
In order to obtain this information from Google, you will have to issue them with a subpoena. This is exceptionally useful if the content of the review is threatening you or your business, or is simply defamatory.
Use Google's own support system
However, there are other ways of dealing with false reviews, without the need to go to court.
According to Google's support page, they will remove any review that is considered to be a personal attack, either towards you or your business. Unfortunately, if that's the case, there is a small chance that you'll still need to send Google a court order before any removal action will take place.
The second option offered by Google is the "Flag" button.
Using this button let's Google know that the content of the review is inappropriate according to their standards. If the review is false, contains spam or advertising or anything of the like, you can flag it and Google will (eventually) evaluate it and act accordingly. Unfortunately though, through this method, you might end up waiting for a long time.
Think about it - there are hundreds of millions of websites listed on Google, and even if just a small number of them have the same problem as you, a long waitlist is still going to form.
At the end of the day though, unduly false claims or spammy comments are not acceptable - so take action. Whichever option you choose, rest assured that results will not fail to follow.
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