Google had begun allowing business owners to reply to reviews written by customers on their Google Place pages since in August 2010 and things were going fine until recently when many business owners are complaining that they are unable to reply to these reviews.

The typical problem that business owners are facing is that they get an error page when they hit the publish button after typing in a response to a particular review on their place page profile. This is a serious problem for businesses who have received a negative review as it is hurting their image and reputation in the market.

Cecelia from Google responded to a thread of complaints on Google Places Help page by saying:

As a quick update, I've shared all of your reports with our team as examples of the issue. We're looking into this and working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Google has also asked that business owners do the following:

• Verify your listing using Google Places

Here are the instructions:
For the verification process visit google.com/local/add, and log into your Places account. From there, be sure your listing is in your account, verified and active. On the dashboard, you'll see Active in green, if your listing is verified.

If your listing is veriried, then visit your Place page in the same browser window. You should be able to respond to the reviews in the Reviews by Google Users section.

• When trying to post a response, ensure that you are logged into the correct Google account.

This needs to be the one that was used to claim the listing.

The issue here is that the problem is still not resolved and these tips have still not helped many of the business owners impacted.

I would suggest that if your profile has negative reviews that you can't respond to, then try to message the person directly who left the review. This will help you get to the bottom of their issue and they might even delete their review or post a positive follow up review - fingers crossed.