Getting reviews to stick on Yelp & Google

[adriandg]

Do you have any tricks to getting reviews to stick on yelp?

Whenever we ask out customers to review us on there their reviews end up getting "detected" as fakes.

I have tried it out myself, and the only way i've gotten them to stick is making several reviews of various different local businesses with average ratings and then dropping one in for the client with a better rating.

Perhaps this is a little on the blackhat/greyhat side of things.  But if our customers are legitimatly trying to review us and it doesn't stick, i don't feel all that bad taking this route, the only real problem is time consumed.

What about google? has anyone had any luck gaining more reviews for their client on google?

[totalseo-155734]

There's really no way around it.  Google/Yelp have decided that unless a user is active over a period of time and reviewing several different businesses, the person must be a fake.  They can't tell the difference and commonly delete reviews.  Many of my local business clients have had legitimate reviews deleted. I've been recommending insiderpages.com since it is easier to get the reviews to stick and they still get indexed by Google.

[adriandg]

That seems to be an american only site. doesn't really solve my problem, as i am in canada.

Also, it seems that the only reviews that show stars next to the number of reviews are google reviews.

I'm open to hearing other peoples opinions on the matter.

[qlkasdjfw]

Personally I haven't experienced this deleted reviews situations. I'm seeing plenty of fake reviews.

[adriandg]

which site? google or yelp? and where? got an example?

[totalseo-155734]

These sites are getting reviews indexed by Google for canada local businessess

homestars.com
canpages.ca

[adriandg]

Thanks! that was very helpful!

Have you had any luck getting reviews to stick with google and yelp though?  I noticed that the only reviews that translate to actual stars on google are google user's reviews.  Are you noticing stars apearing from homestars.com and canpages.ca?

Also, i have seen some n49.ca reviews stick btw.

[totalseo-155734]

No stars, but they do improve your local seo rankings.  A few of my clients have had personal visits from Google local reps who have been able to get reviews re-posted.  With Yelp, the user usually has to write more than one review to avoid deletion.

[networkelites]

Hi Ben,

How about getting reviews that google takes from insiderpages.com or yahoo local, for example, and having them show up at all?  Does google have the ability to choose which reviews it draws from these sites and to place on Google Places pages?

[totalseo-155734]

That's a tough one.  As you probably know Google changes the rules constantly.  It seems to me that whether or not reviews show up has mostly to do with whether or not Google has crawled the page where the review is and updated it's index to include the info.  It usually takes a few weeks from when the review is posted.

As far as ability to choose, sure they could, but they don't.  Google like to make algorithmic changes rather than individual moderation, which does make sense given the volume of data they are working with.

[SeanHennessy]

I have an account on Yelp with 19 real reviews.  The only one that displays is a one star bad review.  All the rest of the 18 are five stars and they hide them as "filtered".  This is a sham company.  There has to be a solution to this.........