Reviews and reputation. Reviewed October 29, 2026
Reputation management
Also called: Review management, Online reputation
Reputation management is the ongoing work of earning reviews, responding to them, fixing listing errors and handling the occasional bad one, across Google and the other sites customers check.
In practice
For a contractor that is Google first, then the BBB, Yelp, Facebook and Nextdoor. The trade-specific sites come after those. The system is a review request after every job, a reply to every review within a day, and a monthly check of every listing.
Skip the services that promise to remove bad reviews. Google removes reviews that break its rules and nothing else.
Related terms
- Review velocityReview velocity is how many new reviews a business earns each month, and a steady flow of recent reviews outweighs a large total that stopped growing two years ago.
- Review responseA review response is the public reply a business posts under a review, and replying to every one, including the bad ones, is read by both future customers and Google.
- Review gatingReview gating is asking customers how they feel first and sending only the happy ones to Google, which Google's policies forbid and which can get reviews removed.
Go deeper
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