Google investigates reports of missing updates and stops updates from local listings
After several days of complaints from businesses, Google has confirmed that it is investigating reports of updates missing from Google Places listings and has stopped the ability for Google Business Profile listings to accept updates.
What Google says. A Google spokesperson told us:
- “When our systems detect suspicious updates, we take a number of steps including removing updates and temporarily suspending updates on a profile to prevent further abuse. We are investigating the matter and will restore any wrongly deleted updates.”
What is the problem. As I wrote in the Search Engine Roundtable, there are a lot of complaints on Google Business Profile sites from business owners and local SEOs who say reviews have mysteriously disappeared. In addition to losing updates, many of these businesses can’t even get new updates to their local listings.
It appears that Google’s spam detection update is increasing in patterns and removing and blocking updates from suspected Google business profiles. It’s not clear whether this is due to spammers abusing some Business Profiles or Google’s algorithms have changed and become more complacent.
More details. Amy Toman, a Google product specialist who volunteers at Google Business Profiles, posted on LinkedIn:
If you or a client is in this situation, you can post on the forum if you want, but know that Google knows and is working on it. No timeline for a solution has been mentioned yet.
There is a new issue I am seeing with Google listings, where after reporting fake or spam reviews, listings get a review block and all reviews are hidden. And in at least one case, their rating was reduced to 0.
Google has been notified and they now say they are aware of the missing update issue and are working to resolve it.
Why do we care. If you noticed that many of your updates are missing and/or you are not getting any new updates this week, this may be related to this problem.
Google is investigating this issue and hopefully we will see many, if not all, of these updates return and new updates roll out.
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