Yelp, with a host of other third party local review websites, are no longer part of Google Place listings for business. Through a lawsuit filed by Yelp and Citysearch, among others, Google decided to remove the additional reviews and leave only their own. These changes were cosmetic and didn’t change business ratings, though they did have minor effects on local search for businesses.
While these changes don’t affect the ratings that businesses acquired from Google’s rating algorithm, it does have a few downfalls for businesses that had racked up numerous written reviews – especially since people are much more likely to trust other patrons’ experiences over a star rating.
For instance, businesses that had built up an extensive online reputation on sites like Yelp might have seen the number of their reviews on Google Places drop from 1,000 to100. That’s a big dip for companies – especially restaurants – that gain many customers from word of mouth marketing. Losing these reviews onsite from the Places page might give customers the idea that a business is less appealing since it may look like it doesn’t have a lot of customers.
However, while businesses may have fewer reviews on their Google Places page, Google is still linking to outside review sites like Yelp and Citysearch. Its reasoning is that they want users to get “a comprehensive view of locations across the globe”. Although, these review links are placed in smaller, less noticeable areas on the Places page and means that going forward it’s going to be more important than ever to get users to review businesses on Google Places, rather than on third party sites.
In the meantime, businesses can keep increasing their Google Places reviews by encouraging customers to review and rate them through social media platforms and even via email campaigns and on their websites. The good business ratings are still there – all that’s needed now are just more visible reviews to back them up.
Google Places is a valuable marketing tool for many small businesses, so when Google makes a change to their layout or algorithm, business owners listen. The latest change came a few months ago when Google was the recipient of a lawsuit from a number of third party review sites such as Yelp and Citysearch. The lawsuit, to make a long story short, kept Google from listing these business reviews since they saw Google as a competitor and having their reviews listed on Google Places would discourage users from visiting their own websites, reducing their pageview and traffic numbers.
These changes don’t affect page rankings for businesses, nor does it change the algorithm on Google’s backend, which rates businesses by the number and quality of reviews. It was a strictly cosmetic change that removed third party reviews onsite, and left only reviews left from Google users on a business’s Place page.
