Google is investigating reports of reviews going missing and pausing reviews on local listings

After respective days of complaints from businesses, Google has confirmed it is investigating reports of missing reviews from Google Local listings and has paused the expertise of Google Business Profile listings to person reviews.

What Google said. A Google spokesperson told us:

• “When our systems observe suspicious reviews, we return a scope of actions including removing reviews and temporarily pausing reviews connected the floor plan to forestall further abuse. We are investigating the rumor and will reconstruct immoderate reviews that were incorrectly removed.”

What is the issue. As I documented connected the MCP, location are dozens of complaints successful the Google Business Profile Forums pinch business owners and section SEOs saying reviews person mysteriously disappeared. In summation to reviews going missing, galore of these businesses are not moreover capable to get caller reviews connected their section listings.

It seems Google’s reappraisal spam discovery algorithms are picking up connected patterns and aggressively removing and blocking reviews connected suspected Google Business Profiles. It is unclear if this is caused by spammers abusing immoderate Business Profiles aliases Google’s algorithms were tweaked and being excessively trigger happy.

More details. Amy Toman, a unpaid Google Product Expert successful the Google Business Profiles, posted on LinkedIn:

If you aliases a customer are successful this situation, you tin station connected the forum if you’d like, but cognize that Google is alert and moving connected it. No timeline for solution stated yet.

There is simply a caller rumor I’m seeing connected Google listings, wherever aft reporting clone aliases spam reviews, listings are receiving a reappraisal artifact and each reviews are being hidden. And successful astatine slightest 1 case, their standing is reduced to 0.

Google has been alerted and they now opportunity they’re alert of the missing reappraisal rumor and are moving to resoluteness it.

Why we care. If you noticed that galore of your reviews went missing and/or you are not getting immoderate caller reviews this week, this mightiness beryllium related this issue.

Google is investigating the rumor and hopefully we will spot many, if not all, of these reviews travel backmost and caller reviews resume.