Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Reviews and Ratings

Dive into how to manage reviews and ratings for your local marketing strategy.


  • Thanks for the post Laura, Here's an interesting article that talks about this topic and how fake reviews tie into the motive https://blog.reviewinc.com/2018/07/24/fake-reviews-latest-news-you-should-know/

    | PR-ReviewInc
    1

  • I can't think of another way. They were great a &  solid increase in CTR. However, was a pain to get approved.

    | KevinBudzynski
    0

  • Hi Fubra, Thanks for your response. My previous question lacked clarity as we want to rank as a review source for the businesses we have listed on our website. We have all of our channels working well (PPC, social, organic, etc.). I'm focusing on getting this issue of having us as a review source working in the knowledge panel as our smaller competitors are there but we aren't. I've included a screenshot to help illustrate what we'd like to achieve. CMxg9Z1

    | Neumarkets.com
    0

  • Hi Kate, If you're talking about the delete account page I'm thinking of, it won't delete the listing. It will just unverify it. So, the listing will continue to exist, just outside of your client's ability to control it. In your shoes, I would: Explain to the client again that their only option is to mark the business as closed, which is equivalent to going out of business. Google My Business is not really an opt-in opt-out platform. If you're in business, you have to deal with it, because even if you don't create a GMB listing yourself, Google can automate one for you, based on their pull of data from around the web. So, educate the client once more that "hiding" from this reality isn't an option. In terms of Google Analytics, that's a separate product from GMB. Whether or not you have a listing doesn't affect use of GA, but, certainly, if the business marks itself as closed, I would expect that to impact their traffic, which will then be reflected in GA. If the client isn't able to face the reality of how Google works, I would end the relationship. As a marketer, it's your job to offer information to the best of your ability. But if a client is unable to act on that information, success is unlikely for you or for them. So, I'd take one more shot at educating this client about basic local business operations, and if they're unable to work within the realities of that, I would walk away. Hope this helps!

    | MiriamEllis
    1

  • Hello Yosepgr, Are these reviews unique to your website, or are they from a review aggregator like epinions? Are they reviewing products, or a business? Generally speaking, I would show the best ones on the page you want to rank, and show the rest either after an event (like Load more), or even on another page, like Amazon does. It all depends on the situation though, so the more info you can provide the better.

    | Everett
    0

  • This is a bad idea and definitely an abuse of the tool. If the link is from a good/trusted site irrespective of the negative view it will pass decent DA to you. The link will still exist and traffic will still follow it. Essentially, disavowing a link is telling Google that the link is a threat to your site. It’s a serious action to take. So you shouldn’t disavow links indiscriminately. Like Google says, you could hurt your own SEO, and that’s not what you want. If its an issue the first thing to always do is to contact the site owner to get it removed. The disavow tool is to stop spammy links and defeat negative SEO attacks (which I have suffered) not as described in your question. I hope that helps

    | Libra_Photographic
    0

  • Last day, MOZ Team publish a post about it. https://moz.com/blog/how-to-optimize-your-google-my-business-listing

    | martinxm
    1

  • Hi Eroc, Yep, this is a super common issue for SEOs. My company's site has reviews load in JavaScript, and Google even crawls and indexes those as if they're separate pages. Google wants to read everything it can, so you've got to figure out the cost/benefit of this situation. If you really do have all of the product information, I'd guess that visitors entering through page 2 of reviews wouldn't be the worst thing, especially since Google would probably choose the page with the reviews most relevant to the query. The main issue from my perspective is wasting Google's crawl budget on your extra review pages. If that's an issue that will significantly help your site (likely if you have a lot of products), you'll want to noindex those reviews like Ikea. There's no other method that will stop Google from wasting it's crawl budget. Hope this helps! Kristina

    | KristinaKledzik
    2

  • Miriam is dead on, I would like to add one other thing to consider. You can still be an owner, transfer primary ownership to the actual owner and that will leave you as an owner. Another consideration, if for any reason your account was to become compromised (flagged as spammy for instance) then all your GMB listings would become suspended since you are the primary owner of all the listings. In the case of a soft suspension, you would have to reverify all your listings.

    | Ben_Fisher
    0

  • Has there been any further clarification on this?

    | garethmorgans
    0

  • Hi Everett, thank you! We will give this a try. If you have any more help based on below we would appreciate it:  As we are looking at replacing reviews to ratings, rating is a property under reviewRating. I was a little confused on where we would be nesting/replacing this? Any help/tips on this would be appreciated or examples. Thank you!

    | revelkayla
    0

  • I probably got hit by the survey a half dozen times over the course of a year. The problem was it's really difficult to take screenshots on my phone, without closing out to the 'desktop'. Finally managed to capture one about six months ago, then sat on it. I know the brands involved, so it's probably pretty easy to verify if the pay per review thing was sanctioned. I'm just not certain which tree to bark up. To me, it's clear the ethics have been at least modestly bent. Compensation involved with any review is a paid review. But the dark side tells me if this is readily available, it might be handy one day.

    | Travis_Bailey
    1

  • That helps some, but there are a few things I'm a little unclear about. Thanks though!

    | BrianAlpert78
    1

  • Hi Calico, You're welcome, and that's good you're not seeing anything in Google Search Console to indicate a problem. Also want to highlight something you've said: "I will do the audit, but my first thoughts looking at it, is that the other fishing charters around me don't really do anything for SEO, so they will likely score low. " The purpose of you doing this audit will be to take the top competitor who isn't being filtered out for your most important keyword phrase, compare his metrics to yours, and then see if going through that process helps you figure out a reason why something he is doing is making him strong enough not to be filtered, compared to your business. So definitely do be sure you are picking that top ranking competitor who is showing up for the term most important to you. I'd really like to hear what you discover from the audit.

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hi Ira, I was curious what your thoughts were about Synup? I am thinking about signing up and was curious how your experience was. Thanks, Errick

    | ErrickGreene
    0

  • Adding to Roman's advice, which I agree with, be sure you've updated all of your government records so that the address reflects your business instead of the old one.

    | MiriamEllis
    0

  • had spikes of 1M visits a day. Happend over 2013 and 2014.  Again, that is a website that consumes almost nothing of resources, just 4-5 pure HTML pages getting 6 lines from database.

    | GastonRiera
    0

  • "The only benefit is trust , increase CTR etc and obviously reviews markup." This is a huge benefit though.  It's abut users at the end of the day and having those stars showing in the serps and having the reviews scrolling on your site (using a widget) has helped me enormously with CTR.  It's one of those where you need to think less about the technical SEO stuff and more about how having the reviews there will increase the CTR and conversion rates.  It also helps time on site - all MASSIVE ranking signals. If I said to you that a piece of technical wizzardry could increase CTR, TOS and conversions then you'd learn how to do it and implement it like immediately.  Well that's what reviews do.  So i'd not worry about marking them up or just use a wordpress widget and get them on there. I'm not massively technical but we do have 500 5* reviews with a widget on every page of the site and are in the top 3 for most non-branded searches because of our CTR. Also google says they want to eventually live in a world without markup when the algo gets smarter so it's all going to be a moot point. Sorry If i've missed the technical nuances of this but we're doing super well just having the nice comments up there on the site (which is more than lots of your competitors have)

    | Smileworks_Liverpool
    0