Google news: Company blocking negative reviews from former employees

Google's European Engineering Center in ZurichREUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann

It seems Google does not want people to search for anything negative about it, as the company is now blocking negative review from former employees.

Google has recently updated it review policies and has now implemented a new rule claiming that negative reviews left by ex-employees are in violation of the company guidelines. This means that employees should watch what they leave on Google My Business, the Google site which handles company reviews since they can easily get banned after leaving a less-than-desirable review, not just about Google but about other companies as well.

The search engine company has now clamped down on negative reviews, claiming that they can also be used in order to manipulate ratings for a specific company which has competitors. The said competitors were then assumed by Google to be capable of using such a tactic. Due to this, Google has stated that user-contributed content is most reliable when it is unbiased, which is why posting negative comments about a former employer is no longer allowed.

It is not clear to what extent Google considers a review negative or how they plan to handle the select people who actually give constructive negative reviews about their former employers. Apparently, the target of their new policy seems to be aimed only at insincere negative reviews. With that said, users are also not allowed to negatively review their own business.

Google hopes that this would make the rating and review system unbiased and more useful for other people since some biased reviews could potentially damage the reputation of a particular business. The good news for companies who were at the receiving end of the negative review situation is that they can now contact Google and have the said reviews removed, depending on how biased or how prejudiced they were. Prior to this new rule, negative, biased, or racist reviews were difficult to remove from the company's online records.