In this topic, we want to speak about Google, as we always do. Nevertheless, the theme will be a little bit painful – we will dive into Playstore reviews deletion process, also known as Google Purge

It all began very long time ago, but crawlers reached new highs in mid-2016. You should heard information, that almost 70% of reviews were removed without any reason – and it was real pain, after all... The most shocking thing: Google removed even native reviews from real, app-engaged users. There are many topics existing since there, but nobody can tell you exactly – why the reviews drop?

WHAT’S HIDDEN BEHIND GOOGLE PURGE?

Many companies, including us, tried to understand reason of reviews falling. There are many suggestions regarding to it, so here we attach the top list of them:

• Google deletes non-trusted reviews, also known as fake reviews – so if big brother suspect you, that you are getting reviews from incentivized users or you purchased them – the cheating will be removed
• Google deletes undeserved reviews from app – for example, if your app have a large scope of crushes, bugs and inner issues , good reviews wont stack on it – its only playstore guys, who decides
• Google continue calculating – it means, that your average (summ of ratings / amount of reviews) being kept by servers and cant be increased rapidly. For example, if you have 3.8 Average today – it can’t be 4.5 tomorrow, so your reviews probably will be deleted
• Google removes reviews from 3-rd tier countries and low Android devices – so, if your main source of reviews is India, and your app users still plays through Android 4.0, its probably suspicious for playstore guys.

Those reasons called top, because both app developers and advertisers spent too much time and money for investigating google purge, and even more people used to write topics about their experience. However, you always can call it all a myth – after all, it depends on your app. We still keep the right to post non-dropping reviews for android. Moreover - now we are going to answer your expected question: how?

HOW TO STOP REVIEWS DROPPING: BREAKING SATIABILITY SECRET

We spent almost 3 years of hard technical and researching work to figure more about Google Algorithms and prevent reviews dropping. In addition, we were forced to chance many things in our inner company’s mechanics too. However, let us start from the beginning.

The most important thing we figured out is simple: not each app user is going to reviews your app! It means that if you have, for example, 1000 App Installs per day and getting 1000 App Reviews from those brand new users... I can stop it right now, because it is unbelievable! If you are a developer – you know what I am talking about, and you know how hard is to make your user review your app. Therefore, even 1 review from 50 installs can be called a miracle. And Google knows... So, if you want to stop losing your reviews – you need to think about your Reviews and Installs Ratio

As we tried this method too many times, we figured special algorithm: for new Playstore app, good ratio is one (1) review per 50-100 app installs. Therefore, if you are a new app on the market and you have 50 installs per week – it means that only one review per week will be organic! Moreover, if you are a mature app with 10.000 total installs – you can think about 1:20 ratio, to be simpler – getting one review from twenty brand new installs. Therefore, keep your installs on high – that is the fundamental of non-dropping app reviews.

The near thing to get non-drop reviews is not space coming too: always think about your users. Yes, we mean that your app needs to be tested before launching, you should answer on each negative review regarding to it, moreover - you must act to improve your application and users experience. For example, if somebody tells you, that the app is not working correctly in Luxembourg – you need to figure “why” and terminate the bug, which makes your user feeling sad.

In addition, the most shocking reason of dropping – is source of reviews, always called geo, from which review come. It’s normal, even great, to get reviews from India, but its suspicious, when your app is not localized for Indian users! So, when you start getting reviews – just place yourself on users place: why will mark you 5-star, when you don’t care about user? Therefore, if your app is localized (don’t miss with “available”) for United States only – make your best to get reviews only from United States, or adapt your app language along with in-app purchases for another country/niche. By the way, we are able to provide organic android reviews from any country you need - just connect with us about.

So, those rules – just a basics, but according to our experience – they can prevent 80% of your review from being removed from Playstore.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR ANDROID REVIEWS STAYS FOREVER?

As a conclusion, we want to keep all the information about Google Purge and prevention together in such checkbox list, and hope that it will help you a lot:

1. Always keep your eye on reviews and installs ratio – 1:50 for new apps and 1:20 for mature apps
2. Receive organic android reviews from your users and answer them
3. Watch over your application, test it and improve it – don’t allow even small bug to meet your customers
4. Localize your app – translate it on users languages, adapt in-app purchases for users currencies
5. Stop rushing – you need to get organic android reviews without jumping from 3.8 average to 5.0 in one day

We hope that those tips will be suitable for your application success. All our experience collected here, and if you need more solutions and answers for why your reviews removed from Playstore – just connect with us, and we will bring all we have aboard to solve your problem. See ya on top charts!