Google Maps Reviews Disappearing - So Where is the best place to host them now?

[webestate]

I think a lot of people are having this problem.  You spend years receiving great reviews on Google Places only to have the wiped out for no reason.

That being the case what 3rd party sites do you all suggest that client reviews be hosted besides your website?

Thoughts?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Good question. Lets make sure you have the right information and you understand what is happening before you come up with a strategy to fix it.........there isnt an easy way to work with traditional third party review sites because of the issue google had with yelp and others....so it has created a small void in the marketplace. You have to build the history back up with google places and hotpot and google maps reviews....THAT IS YOUR BEST OPTION. Don't forget about the other third party review sites, because everyone believes that google is still using that info for relevancy and quality score....

Here is feedback from Google on why they were removed and some additional thoughts on why no third party reviews can really make a huge impact on building the seo value back up.........

The official reason the changes were made is that Google has said it wanted to remove the "spammy reviews". Here is googles official response. There is a detailed technical response posting on googles site. here is the link....

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2445832

Here is what they said:

"You may have seen reviews suddenly disappear from your listing. A few reasons why that may be the case:

• Reviews from third-party websites are no longer displayed on Google Places listings. Below the reviews by Google users, we may link “Reviews around the web” on third-party sites.
• Reviews are removed from Google Maps because they exhibit spammy behavior. 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 also remove reviews that violate our content policy guidelines. We know that sometimes our algorithms may flag and remove legitimate reviews in our effort to combat abuse, but believe that overall, these measures are helping to ensure that the reviews appearing on Place pages are authentic, relevant and useful. Here's our reviews posting guidelines and policy: http://goo.gl/LtFCS
• We have data spread across multiple databases, and we bring all that information together to create your local listing. Reviews can sometimes be dropped from Place pages when we’re trying to reconcile all that information. As we mentioned at the beginning of this note: This is a known issue, and we are working to make it better.
• Occasionally, there is a technical issue that causes Place page reviews to drop from Google Maps for a short period of time (a few days) and then reappear on your listing. This happens every several weeks, when we push out a giant housecleaning update to our listings database. Again, this is a known issue, and we are working to make it better."

That is what google posted. Now the unofficial explanation is they had disagreements with several review sites like Yelp where they wanted free access to all the review content and then would basically undermine yelps positioning in search by posting yelps and other review sites info....yelp said no way. They decided to stop taking the info from third party sites.

To solve your problem you have to make sure you have solid google places, hotpot and maps reviews and citations.....

Hope this helps.