Google Drops 3rd Party Reviews

Google Reviews

Have you noticed your review count has drastically been reduced? That’s because Google has dropped all 3rd party reviews. You will see this on your Google Maps listing or in your Google Places account.

I’ve been encouraging clients for many years to increase their effort to get reviews in Google Reviews from their customers, while encouraging them to ignore Yelp, Dealerrater, Angieslist, etc. It was inevitable after Yelp rebuffed Google’s offer to buy Yelp, that Google would do-it-themselves, just as they have in every niche they could not buy the leader.

If 60 percent or more of your visitors come from Google and 2 percent come from Yelp, why would you care about Yelps? In fact if you look at your analytics, you’ll likely find that Bing, Yahoo and even AOL are worth far more of your attention than getting good reviews at all. (Dont get me wrong, if you have a legitimate-ethical business, you would get, and should try to get positive reviews. It’ll pay off.)

You can read a bit more about the how-to deal with the new environment of reviews over at cfsearchmarketing http://cfsearchmarketing.us/2011/08/01/