At the beginning of this COVID-19 pandemic, the Google My Business team added a new option for temporarily closed. But it seems like some businesses are not currently or temporarily closed and cannot change the status to open in Google.
The interesting thing is that Danny Sullivan of Google said this is not a widespread issue. He said "I've checked, and we don't see that this is a widespread issues. Businesses should be able to mark they're open, and that should stay. I passed this example on. If there are others, people can reply here or post in the forum, and I'll pass those on."
Here are those tweets:
I've checked, and we don't see that this is a widespread issues. Businesses should be able to mark they're open, and that should stay. I passed this example on. If there are others, people can reply here or post in the forum, and I'll pass those on.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 9, 2020
The local SEO community seems to think this is a pretty widespread issue:
Business owners can't do. Suggest an edit is not working either. https://t.co/7lwOm7BFjW pic.twitter.com/tPyB7MhpBf
— Jason Brown Dumpster Fire (@keyserholiday) June 9, 2020
I scanned through the Google My Business forums and didn't find a ton of complaints, but I did find four larger threads with these complaints since March. So it does seem to be an issue, and some are really unable to mark themselves as being open despite trying. Here are those threads; one, two, three and fur but I suspect there are many more.
And are the businesses unable to open support tickets? Because I believe they should be able to do that. If not or if particular ones having trouble, examples would be useful.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 9, 2020
Is this a real issue or not?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: June 18th, I got an email that this is happening again. See the screen shot below, there is no way to open this business that is marked as closed:
