How to keep your reviews when an account closes

Every review a customer leaves on a marketplace or a subscription site belongs to that site. It sits under your account, and when the account goes, the reviews go with it. Accounts get closed for breaking a rule, for a rule that changed last month, for a flag nobody explains, and sometimes for a reason you never find out. An appeal can take weeks. Meanwhile a buyer who searches for you finds nothing to read.

You cannot stop a platform from closing an account. You can make sure that when it happens, the proof of your work is somewhere it cannot reach.

Save what you have today

Do this before anything goes wrong. A closed account usually locks you out of its pages at the same moment it disappears for everybody else.

• Ask for a data download. Many sites have a page in the account settings that sends you a copy of your data. Some include the reviews you received and some only include what you wrote, so open the file and see which you got.
• Screenshot every review. Get the reviewer's name, the date and the whole text into each one, and name the files by date so you can find one later.
• Save a dated copy of your public profile. Paste its address into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine at web.archive.org and press Save Page. That copy is kept by somebody other than you, with a date on it, which makes it harder to wave away than a screenshot.
• Write down who reviewed you. A list of names or order numbers is what the next step runs on.

A screenshot is a record, not proof

Keep the screenshots for yourself. Posting a wall of them as your reviews does less than you would hope. Everybody knows a screenshot takes a minute to fake, and a stranger deciding whether to pay you has no way to check one. Their real use is reminding you who was happy with your work, so you can ask those people again.

Ask the same people again, somewhere you own

The customers who reviewed you once are the ones most likely to do it twice. Most will, if the ask is short and says why. Something like this:

My account on [the site] was closed, and the review you left there went with it. If you have two minutes, would you write it again here? This page is mine, so it will not disappear the next time a site changes its rules: [your link]

Send each person a one-time link of their own if you can. If you are using TheyRave, a review left through one carries the Verified mark, which says it came through a link you sent to that person. It is the closest thing to the proof the old platform gave you.

Expect fewer reviews back than you had. Ten real ones that stay up are worth more than a hundred that are gone.

Ask for a copy of every new review from now on

The easiest time to protect a review is before you need to. Keep asking for the platform's own review if it helps you there, and ask for one on your own page as well, at the end of every sale or session. A card in the package or a line in the final invoice works.

Before you put your link in a platform's messages, read its rules on outside links. Some limit them, and breaking that rule is one more way to lose an account.

What a page of your own does not fix

A review page keeps your proof. It does not bring you the buyers the platform's search used to send. If the account was closed by mistake, appeal, and keep appealing: reviews rebuilt somewhere else are no substitute for the account itself. What the page gives you is a place to send people while you sort out the rest, and a reputation that is still standing when you do.

For the wording of a first ask, the guide on how to ask for a review has messages you can copy. If you have no website to put a page on, how to show reviews without a website covers that.