When our clients run into the problem of a disgruntled patient “spamming” malicious reviews across Google, Healthgrades, and Vitals, we share this guide with them so they can remove the reviews.
Appealing a Google Review
The best course of action to appeal a Google a review is to report the review from the Google Listing or on your Google My Business Dashboard so that it is ultimately removed.
To do this, you’ll want to follow the below instructions:
- Find the review and select the three dots on the right-hand side. The “Report review” option will appear — select this.
- Choose the reason that makes the most sense based on the review:
Note: You can review Google’s policies to get a clearer understanding of what each of the above options means.
Fun tip: Having more than one person at your practice submitting an appeal request will increase the odds of Google removing the review. You could say the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Appealing a Healthgrades or Vitals Review
If a Healthgrades or Vitals review is grossly incorrect and/or breaks the community guidelines (which includes name-calling, personal attacks, racist comments, threats, obscenities, phone numbers, email addresses, or URLs), there is a good chance that Healthgrades/Vitals will remove the review if you flag or report it.
To flag a comment on Healthgrades, select the ellipsis in the top-right corner of the comment box. Healthgrades Support Inquires can be placed on their contact page. Healthgrades also provides a lengthy list of review guidelines.
To report a comment on Vitals, select “Report Abuse” at the bottom-right of the review. Vitals support requests can be placed on their feedback page. Vitals reserves the right to remove any comments which may be deemed offensive, malicious, inappropriate, sexually explicit in nature, or not made in good faith. Additional Vitals policies and other related items are available on their FAQ page.
In Closing
Hopefully, you never receive a malicious or offensive review, but if you do, we hope this quick guide makes things a little easier.
Just in case the appeal process takes a while, the best defense is sometimes a good offense. Learn how to build hundreds of positive reviews with rater8 to drown out the negative ones.
