Google Review Replies Disappearing
Chris Ratchford

Nov 23, 2020 Update: The missing responses appear to all be back now.

It’s another week and another round of Google review issues. On Wednesday, November 11th, there was a technical issue that prevented new Google from being published. This technical issue lasted two days. The team was able to identify the problem, and the reviews started to be published again. It took Google several days to post all of the missing reviews. I had a Google review show up four days after it was posted. There are two forum threads stating that reviews have been removed over the past few days.

Yesterday on the Google My Business forum, I started to see an uptick in complaints that review replies had disappeared. I reached out to a few brands, and they did not see any instances where their replies are missing. Unlike last week’s issue, this appears isolated to a handful of individual accounts and not everyone. I reached out to the GMB team and have yet to receive a response. Time will tell if Google can resurrect the review responses or if they are lost forever.

What’s interesting is that not all review replies went missing. The restaurant Molly MacPherson’s Scottish Pub & Grill lost the review replies for the reviews left on October 31st. Their new and older review responses are still live. I spoke with Justine from Molly MacPherson’s and she advised me that she had replies from 38 weeks ago removed as well. I see the same thing with LawnSavers. They, too, have both current and older review replies showing up and a batch of missing replies. It is intermittent with no real clear pattern.

I did see another thread were a business advised that their replies to Q&A’s went missing. I have asked Google if this is related to the replies issue. Hopefully, somebody from Google gets back to me.

Want more local SEO tips?
Check out our LocalU event
October 13, 2023 
Toronto/Blue Mountain, ON

Chris designed his first website almost 25 years ago in the days of Macromedia Dreamweaver. Fast forward a dozen years later, Chris started his own “one-man” dental SEO agency, Prodentite, helping dentists with their online presence from custom dental websites and local SEO, to paid search. In 2012, Chris attended his first (of many) LocalU conference where he met Joy Hawkins and many other key contributors in the newly emerging world of local search.