After several days of complaints from businesses, Google has confirmed it is investigating reports of missing reviews from Google Local listings and has paused the ability of Google Business Profile listings to receive reviews.

What Google said. A Google spokesperson told us:

• “When our systems detect suspicious reviews, we take a range of actions including removing reviews and temporarily pausing reviews on the profile to prevent further abuse. We are investigating the issue and will restore any reviews that were incorrectly removed.”

What is the issue. As I documented on the Search Engine Roundtable, there are dozens of complaints in the Google Business Profile Forums with business owners and local SEOs saying reviews have mysteriously disappeared. In addition to reviews going missing, many of these businesses are not even able to get new reviews on their local listings.

It seems Google’s review spam detection algorithms are picking up on patterns and aggressively removing and blocking reviews on suspected Google Business Profiles. It is unclear if this is caused by spammers abusing some Business Profiles or Google’s algorithms were tweaked and being too trigger happy.

More details. Amy Toman, a volunteer Google Product Expert in the Google Business Profiles, posted on LinkedIn:

If you or a client are in this situation, you can post on the forum if you’d like, but know that Google is aware and working on it. No timeline for resolution stated yet.

There is a new issue I’m seeing on Google listings, where after reporting fake or spam reviews, listings are receiving a review block and all reviews are being hidden. And in at least one case, their rating is reduced to 0.

Google has been alerted and they now say they’re aware of the missing review issue and are working to resolve it.

Why we care. If you noticed that many of your reviews went missing and/or you are not getting any new reviews this week, this might be related this issue.

Google is investigating the issue and hopefully we will see many, if not all, of these reviews come back and new reviews resume.