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Google Places Removes Third Party Reviews from Search Results

I want to start out by saying this has been an awesome thread. It's been great to see everyone contribute so much information and it's interesting to see everyone's perspective.

A few final points to my final take on this:

1.) Google is going to always to whatever they want, in the past I have read disaster stories about huge businesses shutting down overnight because Google changed their SEO algorithm which also caused hundreds of employees to be jobless. Things could be worst.

2.) Google has been putting a big emphasis on the quality of content for search and I see them shifting their efforts the same way towards customer experiences (reviews); ultimately they are going to have to filter out the real reviews from the fake ones, and that's a tough thing to do, especially when the review is being aggregated from a 3rd party review site. This was bound to happen some day.

3.) DealerRater still has tremendous value. They have an amazing process, great training and like any other online business, this might be a small bump in the road for them but by no means an end.

4.) Yelp never wanted to be part of Google Places in the first place, so that has to mean something. Here is an interesting article, 4 months old but still relevant:
Google issues ultimatum to Yelp: free content or no search indexing - Telegraph

5.) I'm starting to see this trend that concerns me. We continue to keep investing time and money on expanding our brands onto 3rd party sites that can a.) go out of business any day, b.) change their terms of use at any time. A perfect example of this is Wall Street's takes on Zynga's upcoming IPO, in so many words, Facebook owns them. That's a scary thought. The same goes for reviews and everything else.

"Facebook is the primary distribution, marketing, promotion and payment platform for our games. We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future," the filing explains. "Any deterioration in our relationship with Facebook would harm our business and adversely affect the value of our Class A common stock."
Zynga's IPO filing shows utter dependence on Facebook

Anyways, great job at always keeping it real in here. Hope your having a better weekend then me sitting in front of my computer.

Regards,
Adam Boalt
GOSO
 
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Reactions: 2 people
How great is this site? Thank you. This was the first stop... I was getting questioned on why our score and related stuff had changed completely on Google. This explains it. We have a strong score on Dealerrater.com and only a few on Google, including a couple old low ones.
 
This morning we showed almost 900 reviews for our Jeff Wyler Eastgate Auto Mall location when you did a search and saw their Google Places listing come up in the search results. This afternoon, it only shows 36 reviews in the SERP results. Why? Google has made a change to only show Google reviews in their SERP results, and not show third party reviews. This is incredibly disappointing as we had lots of reviews at DealerRater, JudysBook, Yahoo, Edmunds, Angies List, Merchant Circle, and many more sites. Between this change and the introduction of Google +1, Google is really flexing its muscles with its dominance in the search engine market, and forcing our hands to use their tools and play their way if you want to benefit...

Wow, what a ride local reviews have been thru. Kevin has <700 reviews up and dealer rater comments are integrated into the SERPs


used cadillac escalade near cincinnati oh - Google Maps




Very Nice
 
Google is doing what they have been doing since the beginning, slowly adding new services to their brand. They rather do everything themselves instead of depending on third-party websites/tools. I honestly, appreciate the fact that they integrate everything into one place. Although If you don't like google, you probably won't appreciate that as much as I do.

When it comes down to reviews I rather have 10 great, well described, reviews than have hundreds of reviews that I won't really read through.
 
Marco,

Your team needs to be here ---> Google<--- before your reviews become important

...or... they have to me NOT HIDDEN on your platform before they become important to shoppers.

How does that make sense..

51 negative reviews.
16 negative reviews.
441 all positive reviews.
110 all positive reviews.

Is there a reason why everyone on Yelp absolutely hates them? But DealerRater + Google are perfect.

Wow that is clustered. Like 5 dealerships with the same name..
 
How does that make sense..

51 negative reviews.
16 negative reviews.
441 all positive reviews.
110 all positive reviews.

Is there a reason why everyone on Yelp absolutely hates them? But DealerRater + Google are perfect.

kcar,

There are 2 dealers represented in this search, one dealer in AZ one in CA. The "51" represents the CA dealer.

Also, on the AZ store, it isn't that there are 16 mostly negative reviews on Yelp, there are 45 filtered reviews that appeared to be mostly positive. The breakdown is more like this:

61 mostly positive reviews on Yelp (45 of which are filtered)
441 mostly positive reviews on DealerRater (certified partner for nearly 2 yrs, not a surprising number of reviews at all over that period)
110 mostly positive reviews on Google (some of which are likely the result of DealerRater's Push tool)

I don't think the discrepancy is in the star count as much as it is the volume, and that can be explained pretty simply by the date range and ease of use for a consumer to leave their feedback. It is reasonable that a consumer will leave a review where they researched, or in DealerRater's case, where the sales team leveraged the content to make the sale.

This is a good store doing a great job of building reviews on multiple platforms and leveraging them. Unfortunately Yelp's filtering out non-Yelpers is not helping them much.