Angry over Google losing your reviews? Don't worry?you're not alone

A troubling new trend is sweeping through Google, causing many business owners, as well as the SEO community, to get worried?and angry.

Imagine if you had toiled day in and day out to establish a successful and professional online presence. You had a website, a Google+ business page to direct searchers to your website, and a mountain of glowing reviews on your Google+ page to further incentivize that click. Now, imagine that, in the blink of an eye, most of those reviews were gone (in particular, the good ones), leaving you with a less-than-stellar review page and a damaged online reputation.

If you?re imagining a bit of shock, or anger, you have now experienced an inkling of what many business owners are feeling throughout the past couple of months. Since the switch to Google+ Local (formerly Google Places?you can read about the change in our previous blog post), Google has been ?losing? reviews on many Google+ pages. An entire forum in Google has been filled with this issue:

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According to Google, reviews can be lost or removed for a number of reasons:

• Reviews on third-party websites (i.e. Yelp, CitySearch, etc.) no longer appear on Google+ pages. Only reviews that have been directly submitted to the Google+ page are displayed.
• Reviews appear ?spammy? or violate content guidelines. This is a gray area?Google will not reveal what factors their search algorithm uses in determining what constitutes ?spam,? but they do give one absolute no-no that reviewers and business owners should be aware of:

?We can?t share specifics about what signals we use, but our goal is to provide end-users with high-quality information they can trust and use that info to make informed decisions. (We can share ? reviews with URLs in them are automatically marked as spam. No URLs, please!)?

Google?s posting guidelines can be found here. A quick rundown of their policy is that they remove reviews if they:

?include inappropriate content, including content that is illegal or copied from another website
?include advertising or spam
?are fake (which is explicitly against bar association guidelines in most states, by the way)
?are off-topic, not based on personal experience, or a ?rant?
?exhibit a conflict of interest (posting a review of a competitor, for instance)

• Data simply gets ?lost? as it goes through the process of being compiled by Google?s algorithm. According to Google, ?This is a known issue, and we are working to make it better.?
• Reviews located on a duplicate listing of your business may be deleted.
• ?Technical issues? may cause reviews to disappear from Google Maps for a short amount of time and then reappear.
• The launch of Google+ Local meant that Google reviewers writing reviews directly on a Google+ page could choose to make those reviews public or private. ?Private? reviews will not appear on the business listing.

We believe that this new trend in losing reviews, however, comes from the changes Google has recently made?updates to its review algorithm means that good reviews are getting caught in the ?spam? filter. And the switch to Google+ Local has caused an unexpected side effect of data loss and reviews being inadvertently marked as ?private.? Unfortunately, Google does not yet give business owners whose pages have lost reviews any means to quickly get their reviews back:

?There?s no way currently to quickly, easily and absolutely get your reviews back on your listing, nor is there much our support team can do to ensure they get reinstated.? [italics theirs]

They simply offer an acknowledgement that issues exist and mention that ?things will get better soon?:?

?Yes, it?s going to take time, and we know that can be frustrating. But we hope the work we?re putting into long-term fixes today will significantly improve your experience soon.?

In many cases, the reviews are simply gone, never to return. If this is the case with your business page, there is not a whole lot you can do to instantaneously retrieve the reviews. You may decide to wait to see if Google finds the reviews. If this is not the best option for you?and it may not be, if Google lost only the ?good? reviews, leaving you with the bad ones?you can reach out to happy clients who have left a review and ask them to re-post it.

The best path for business owners is to take preventative measures, since your options after the reviews are lost are few. Make sure that clients know what they should and shouldn?t do when reviewing your business. Let clients know that they must not include URLs. When requesting reviews from clients, have them save their reviews, so that if they are ever lost, they can simply re-submit them. (Do not, however, tell them to submit the same review to multiple sites, as Google will then delete it).

Another option recommended by our friend Jake Puhl at Firegang Digital Marketing?is to take screenshots of all your reviews every week or so?then you have real data to show the Google support team if issues arise on your Google+ Local pages.?

If you want to avoid the hassle completely, at least until Google has fixed the issue, you can also tell clients to review your business only on third-party sites like AVVO,and Yelp (especially Yelp, since upcoming iOS6 changes will push Yelp to the forefront on iPhones and iPads, which we discussed in an earlier blog post here). While they won?t show up on your Google+ page in their entirety, Google does include a ?Reviews from around the web? link on your business page, which will at least let searchers know that your business has been reviewed.

Finally, don?t let Google?s issues prevent you from working to gather reviews for your business: reviews are essential to your online presence (we explain why in this?blog post. As reviews are being lost, it is even more important that you continue your efforts encouraging happy clients to leave reviews.

Source: http://getnoticedgetfound.com/law-firm-marketing/1982/

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