In the past week or so, many local SEOs have been complaining that reviews on local listings in Google are disappearing. Some businesses are noticing a review or two disappear while others are noticing all their reviews just vanish from Google.
Some are saying it is tied to the launch of short names and removing your short name will bring back the reviews but I am not sure if that is correct.
Joy Hawkins wrote in the Local Search Forums:
I wanted to let you guys know about a current trending issue that is causing people to lose reviews on Google. We've seen many reports of businesses losing reviews each day recently. Sterling Sky (my company) lost one as well as many of our clients. Google is aware of the issue and I'm currently waiting for them to confirm if you need to contact GMB support to have this fixed or if they are able to fix it for everyone all at once. I'll keep this thread updated when I hear back.
Joy added "A user on the Google My Business forum deleted his short name inside GMB and the reviews came back. You might want to consider giving that a try."
I am just not sure if that is related or not - Google My Business is and had been very glitchy recently.
Anyway, I have not seen progress with this issue but we know the Google My Business team is delayed with handling support requests.
Forum discussion at Local Search Forums.
