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.
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