After the name (formerly Google My Business), you’ll no doubt have noticed that the entire Google Business My Profile interface has changed recently. And it’s not without its share of bugs on the Google side!
Here’s the latest:
Google has corrected a bug that caused reviews to disappear from Google business profiles. Google confirms that reviews have been restored.
Danny Sullivan, Google’s search liaison, announced this on Twitter in response to Mike Blumenthal, who says he reported the bug a week ago.
We apologize here. The team is aware of this bug and is actively working on it. Many notices have been restored, and this work will continue.
– Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 15, 2022
Blumenthal doesn’t exaggerate the seriousness of the bug. Reviews are important to a professional, and their deletion can have a significant impact on his revenue.
There are many threads in the Google Business Profile help forums started by business owners who have lost most or all of their reviews. In every thread, business owners have one thing in common. After applying Google’s suggested changes to their business profiles, they all lost reviews.
Blumenthal writes in a blog post that he discovered Google was changing the customer identification number (CID) when companies applied the suggested changes:
“Digging a little deeper, I discovered that, in each case, Google had changed the CID, the identifier Google uses to link all relevant information to a business, including reviews. Typically, the CID only changes when two listings merge or when Google has permanently suspended a listing for violating guidelines, then reinstated it.”
Customer notices are associated with a specific CID number, which means that changing the CID deletes the notices.
This should never happen, especially not with the modifications suggested by Google.
A correction is underway and, hopefully, it will be sufficient to restore the original CID numbers of the Google business profiles concerned.
