Google My Business suspended features due to Covid-19
Google My Business might not be high on your agenda right now given the current situation, however with everyone on lockdown, internet searches are increasing as people entertain themselves at home. Therefore you should pay attention to GMB as it is the first window to your brand for many people.
On Friday 20th March 2020 Google My Business announced that they were suspending some of their features due to “the unprecedented COVID-19 situation” and “to protect the health of their team members”
So what’s changing?
Most significantly are reviews and the Q&A’s sections:
Reviews & replies to reviews
This feature will be unavailable. Which means, you will not be able to write a new review of a business. If you’re a business owner, you will not be able to reply to any reviews that have been previously left. You should however still be able to see the reviews left for a business.
However, at the time of writing, I was still able to review and edit my reviews.
Q&A’s
All question and answers will be unavailable during this time. In fact, they have been completely removed for the time being, so you will not be able to view existing questions and answers.
Newly Created Listings, Claims and Verifications
Google will prioritise and manually review critical health-related businesses, other business are likely to see a delay in publication.
Information Edits
Google will prioritise edits to critical health-related businesses.
They have also said they will temporarily prioritise reviewing:
- open and closed states
- special hours
- temporary closures
- business descriptions
- business attribute edits; for example, if you now offer a delivery service
for other verified businesses.
To date we have still been able to post updates, add offers and events on our profiles but there have been reports of increase in post rejections, however we have not seen this.
