How do I get Google Places to pick up my reviews from other sites?

[vinnyb2000]

I have reviews on Yelp, Insiderpages.com, and Citysearch.  All of my contact information matches up, but Google does not seem to be finding them and adding them to my Google Places page.  Is there anything I need to do to make this happen?

[FrankWickers]

The Google bots automatically crawl sites such as Yelp, Insiderpages, and Citysearch, so in time they will manage to reach your profile on those sites. Once they do reach the profile, they will usually automatically scan the reviews there, and add them to your Google Places account's reviews.

Basically it's all automatically done. You just have to sit back and wait. It can take up to 3 months from personal experience, and even potentially longer. If nothing else you could use the time to find a nice bar on Yelp, and go hang out there until the Google Bots decide to get their gears in motion.

Also, make sure that the information listed on your Yelp/Insider/Citysearch profile is pretty much the same as the information on your Google Places profile listing. Things like the business title/name and address should be the same, so that way Google can be sure that the profile it is looking at on Yelp is for the same company it has in its own Google Places databse.

[ninjamarketer]

Google will automatically pickup the reviews from other sites but you can increase the speed of sync by making sure your profile is an exact match on the review sites. It is highly recommended that you take over the ownership of your profile on each of the top local review sites and optimize your business information. We have tested this technique and it worked well.

Here are the details of the test.

Sample -

Business A - New Google Place account and exact matching Judysbook.com + Citysearch account (exact headline, address, and tel#).

Business B - New Google Place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account with a different headline but same phone number and address.

Business C - New Google place account and JJudysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different phone # but same address and headline.

Business D - New Google place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different address but same headline and phone #.

Submit each Judysbook.com + Citysearch account landing page to Twitter and digg manually one time only after reviews have been added. (Spam free Twitter account with 2000+ followers and clean Digg account with 50+ followers and regular diggs)

Outcome

Google picked up the reviews from Judysbook.com for A and Citysearch account for B.

Note - Google only picked up 1 or 2 reviews for both A and B from the review site so there could be some special algorithm in place for selecting the reviews based on quality.

I will be writing a blog post on my blog on this study soon.

Hope this helps.

Sameer