Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for confirming. I wanted to ask, as I saw the reference to legal action in that person's review. Because of that, this is the point at which you have to switch from thinking of this as a reputation issue to thinking of it as a legal one. In a blog post here at Moz, I strongly advocate that any mention of legal action by a consumer is a signal that the business needs legal counsel. Please, take the consumer's statement seriously and consult with an attorney. This goes beyond Google and their ability to moderate consumer activity. It's a legal matter.

I'm so sorry you are having this trouble with a customer, and the best thing I can do is recommend that you speak to a lawyer to discover best steps toward resolution of the situation. Wishing you good luck.

Hi Dan,

LCnetwork's second response does a really good job of clarifying the situation and your opportunities.

For more reading:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/08/10/google-business-pages-to-merge-or-not-to-merge-that-is-the-question/

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/11/28/having-issues-with-your-glocal-social-merge-my-advice-dont/

Hi Again,

I showed your image to a few very good Local SEOs and no one had ever seen anything like it before. Maybe some type of radius function. Maybe Google is testing something.

Update: I stand corrected. Someone I spoke to says they have seen this in the Google My Business dashboard and that it was called 'hit radius'. It might have been something showing where most calls or traffic were coming from. I guess it's not a well-known feature whatever it is! Might be worth it to take it to the Google and Your Business Forum and see if you can get more info on this from a TC there.

Hi There!

GetFiveStars is well-thought-of in the industry and can be very helpful for businesses that are otherwise struggling to earn and manage consumer sentiment. I test drove the product before it launched and was pretty amazed by it then, and since that time, they've added so many new features. Definitely check out GetFiveStars blog, as well ... good tips on there!

You might also want to check out this free review handout generator: https://whitespark.ca/review-handout-generator/

Hi Clicksjim,

This is an 'it depends' answer.  Basically, yes, if you're creating a brand new listing, you still create it via Places, but in regards to what happens with + and + Local, that's more complex.

Here's Google's own explanation of this topic:

http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2623007

And here is a really good FAQ:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/business/oRvAQC_IakA/vsfNhuMzURYJ

In reading that last post, do note that it was written before the whole merging thing happened, so merging is available to some businesses now, but not recommended for all. Read:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/08/10/google-business-pages-to-merge-or-not-to-merge-that-is-the-question/

and

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/11/28/having-issues-with-your-glocal-social-merge-my-advice-dont/

and

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/12/19/service-area-business-with-a-verified-social-local-google-page-delete-it/

Hope you find these helpful!

Hi Nathan,

I recommend going with USPS version. I use SmartyStreets.com to look these up. Also, recommend you check out Nyagoslav Zhekov's recent post on acceptable NAP:

http://www.whitespark.ca/acceptable-google-maps-nap-abbreviations-and-variations

Hi MissThumann,

You've asked a good question, and I reached out to GetFiveStars' co-founder to be sure you were getting a good answer. Mike Blumenthal let me know that while you can add the GetFiveStars widget to the homepage, Google won't show the stars, and because of this, it's not really a recommended practice to use this widget on your homepage. That being said, you could definitely add it to any other page of the website.

He also let me know that the widget includes business/org details in addition to aggregate reviews and a link to the testimonial page, so your webmaster does need to make sure there is no conflicting schema on any page you might add the widget to.

It was very nice of Mike to get back to me so speedily, and I would encourage you to be sure you are making use of GetFiveStars' support options to be sure you're using their product to its maximum potential. Mike mentioned he has a draft manual he'd be happy to share with you if you reach out to the company's support.Hope this helps!

Hi Nexxtep,

There are several things to consider here. You mention:

Google+/Local/Places/whatever-the-heck-you-call-it-these-days page

After visiting your website, I'm trying to ascertain whether your business is actually local or virtual. Do you serve clients face-to-face at your location or theirs? If not, your business is virtual and not appropriate for inclusion in Google's local products.

What also needs to be considered is the fact that Google has not displayed true local results for website design and SEO firms since 2010. You offer IT services, I see, and I don't know whether Google would lump you in with this other group of unsupported industries, but it's something to consider.

In sum, if your business doesn't meet Google's definition of local, then a Google+ Local page is not right for you. You can, however, set up a Google+ Business page, for which you don't need to local (you could be national, like a brand, etc.).

If you'd like to provide further information to clarify your business model or question, please do so.

Hi Bob,

I think Patrick is on the right track with this. If you have a legitimate connection to these other companies, it won't hurt you to be internationally listed. What I can't say is whether it will help you, but I don't feel that it will hurt you in any way.

Hi Gabe,

As James mentions, there's not a known number that would  = too many. What is known is that Google does filter out reviews if they arrive in unnatural patterns. A business that has been sitting in Google My Business for years and has only earned 15 reviews in that time suddenly acquiring 30 reviews in a month might, indeed, look odd and trip that filter. But those are not exact numbers.

I've never actually consulted with a college as a client before so the idea of a review campaign amongst students is a bit new to me. Just brainstorming here, off the cuff. In a traditional business setting, one fundamental technique of review acquisition to is ask your HAPPY customers to review you. You'll need to consider how to approximate this in an educational setting. How do you know which students are happy? Ones who have won some sort of award? Members of a winning rowing team? One idea might be former alumnae who have gone on to great things for which you know they credit the U, in part. If you simply do a student-body-wide ask, you are likely to end up with the sort of complaints seen here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+University+of+New+Mexico/@35.0843187,-106.6197812,15z/data=!4m7!3m6!1s0x0:0x7777c7361d5ed347!8m2!3d35.0843187!4d-106.6197812!9m1!1b1

So, it seems to me that, in order to control the velocity with which reviews come in and also to approach this as a business would, you'd need to focus on a small subset of students or former students for a given time period and then focus on another group.

I'd start by defining a goal for this project. What do you hope to achieve by earning more reviews? Then, begin experimenting with different forms of outreach that might contribute to this goal. And, of course, avoid known pitfalls.

1. Don't ask for too many reviews at once.

2. Don't specify that you want positive reviews.

3. Don't offer incentives/gifts of any kind.

4. Don't ask people who work for the U to review it.

Just some initial thoughts here. Hope they are helpful.

Hi Nexxtep,

So it does sound like your business has a real local component. The trick will be to convince Google of that

What keywords are you trying to rank for? I looked up 'it services valdosta, ga' and am not seeing it bring up any true local results at all. So this may be one of those industries for which Google just isn't going to show the pack of local results at all, no matter what you do, meaning that your efforts will need to be largely organic.

Hi Vernon!

Good questions! There are 2 really important facts to understand regarding marketing service area businesses (SABs):

1. Google is highly biased toward physical location and sees each business as most relevant to its physical location. Unfortunately, this puts SABs in kind of a weird position because, in the real world, they are equally relevant to every city they travel to in order to serve customers ... but Google doesn't see it this way. When we want to be visible in Google's local and organic results, we must perforce play by Google's rules. (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en)

2. Representing your location data accurately is a must. Do not ever attempt to be appear to be physically located any place that you aren't. Per Google's rules, you should only build 1 Google+ Local page per physical location and whatever town that office is located in will be the one for which you have the best hope of ranking in the local pack results. With few exceptions, for any city you serve but for which you lack a physical address, your best hopes will be to gain organic, rather than local, rankings. Unless you are in a rural area or a very niche profession, you are unlikely to rank in the local packs for any city in which you lack a physical location. This is the reality for all SABs.

So, the local search marketing strategy for SABs generally looks like this:

1. Create a unique landing page on your website for each of the major cities you serve. Make these pages of the highest possible quality you can. The goal here is to hope for some organic visibility for these pages. You can read all about city landing pages here: https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

2. Create a Google+ Local page for each city in which you have a legitimate physical office. Be sure your Google+ Local pages are in complete compliance with the Google guidelines linked to above. The goal here is to gain local pack visibility for your physical location cities.

3. If the combination of efforts in steps 1 and 2 fail to get you good visibility for any city that's really important to you, the only alternative is to pay for advertising via Google's Adwords program, creating a campaign that helps your ad to show up for chosen cities.

Regarding Moz Local, our service will help push out your physical location data to our partner network, helping you get your data consistent on the 5 major local business data aggregators and 2 other important sites. We draw from and validate against the data we find on your Google+ Local pages and Facebook Place listings. Having consistent citations is a major component of achieving high local rankings, but this will all fall under the same heading as Google's guidelines: local rankings for physical locations only.

Hope this helps, and please let me know if you have any further questions about this!

Hi Jeremy,

Good questions, and unfortunately, the bad news is that review spam on Google is rampant, and unfortunately, does not appear to be well-policed. Technically, yes, Google could both remove spam reviews and penalize the listing that is engaging in them (either manually or algorithmically), but as Mike Blumenthal has recently been documenting, Google does not seem overly interested in devoting resources to catching or penalizing review spammers (definitely read: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2017/04/17/the-largest-review-spam-network-ever-or-who-is-shazedur-rahman-and-why-should-you-care/)

There seem to be thousands of fake reviews in the network Mike has been tracking which violate not only Google's guidelines but also, likely, FTC regulations. Unfortunately, this state of affairs with Google appearing to ignore massive review spam calls into question the trustworthiness of their review product and it's something I would hope to see them crack down on in future.

Google's situation provides good background as to the famous stringency of Yelp's review policies. Yelp is highly invested in ensuring that reviews on their platform are legitimate. This is why they remove 28% of the reviews they receive and why they have publicly shamed erring accounts from time to time.

So, for now, if you're trying to convince a business not to spam Google's review product, you are likely to have to use something other than the immediate threat of penalties as your argument. This might include:

1. The possibility of a future Google crackdown at any time, with consequences that could be as mild as a soft penalty with loss of the fake reviews, to as severe as being banned with all of the traffic and revenue your GMB listing used to drive for your brand vanishing overnight.

2. The possibility of consumers discovering spam on their own and causing permanent damage to the brand's reputation via Word-of-Mouth, social sharing, etc., as well as the obvious loss of the customer and his network of friends if they are disgusted enough.

3. The possibility of FTC actions, lawsuits, etc. This should startle any business on the review spamming road: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2296366/fake-online-reviews-cost-19-companies-usd350-000

4. The weakness of a marketing strategy that relies of faking success instead of actually achieving it. You can't use fake reviews as a benchmark of growth, gains, quality control or anything like that. You're just fooling yourself, instead of putting in the work to achieve a genuine reputation for excellence.

You may think of other discussion points, but these four should be enough to convince any legitimate business with even a small amount of concern for staying in business that these risky shortcuts are a hazard rather than an asset.

Hope this helps!

Hi Anton,

Because of the nature of your business (web design), you fall into a funny category in Google's handling of the SERPs. If you were a plumber or a doctor, the answer would be simple, but Google hasn't shown local results for queries like 'web design Edmonton' since 2010. Both website design and SEO firms all got knocked out of the true Local index at that point, and so, your efforts for rankings actually have to be viewed as organic, rather than local, because of this oddity.

What are you seeing when you simply search for 'web design' from an Edmonton-based device? Are you seeing organic rankings of any local companies, or are they random, national businesses. When I search for web design from my computer, I don't get any companies in my town (despite the fact that my own website design company is located there!) What I do get is big, monster design firms and entries from things like Wikipedia giving definitions of the term 'web design'. So, that leads me to view a search like 'web design' as a really broad search. I'm not doing a technical analysis of each of the top 10 listings, but whatever their authority is, Google is showing them to me, and it appears to have nothing to do with my locale.

Do this same search yourself, and I would bet you are seeing the same. If so, this means that ranking for the broad term 'web design' would be a matter of major organic SEO work (and probably not something most web design companies are even aiming for) simply because of the scope of the competition. Now, if you are seeing something different than what I'm describing, that would be worth noting, too. If Google is showing Edmonton-based companies for the broad search, that would be very interesting to me to know.

At the end of the day, regardless of what Google is displaying, everything must be viewed from an organic mindset rather than a true local one, because of Google's handling of web design firms.

Hope this helps!

Hi There -

Here's what I see when I do your 2 main searches, "nail salon pigeon forge tn" and "nail salon sevierville tn". You are ranking organically on the 1st page of Google for both terms but are excluded from the 7-pack. From what you've described, it sound like you may have violated Google's guidelines by having more than one verified Google+ Local page for each location. If you local rankings disappeared after you claimed more than 1 listing for each location, then this is likely what has caused you to disappear from the packs. This is sometimes referred to as a 'disconnected' listing - when you rank well organically but not in the packs.

What steps have you taken since then? Do you still have multiple listings for the same location in your Google My Business dashboard? Have you taken steps to close them, as described here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/4569146?hl=en . Have you tried contacting Google directly to ask about this? You can do so via the Contact Us link here: https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639

Hey There!

Was his disappearance from the local packs coeval with the rollout of Possum? If there are other law firms on the same block (or even couple of blocks), he could simply be being filtered by Possum. When you zoom in on the map, does he appear? If so, Possum is a likely culprit, though I can't say for sure without seeing the actual listing.

Obviously, the other thing to check for would be guideline violations/penalties/malware.

I also recommend reading this thread over at the Local Search Forum, which is discussing the phenomenon of proximity to the point of search impacting local rank in a variety of ways: https://www.localsearchforum.com/local-seo-ranking/43925-page-hated-within-100-mile-radius-city-loved-outside.html

From your description, I suspect Possum, but this is a guess without reviewing your client's unique scenario. Hope this helps!

Hi Chris,

Without being able to look at the actual listing, it's difficult to diagnose an issue like this one. If you cannot share your client's details (understandable) can you provide further clarification as to your initial description of the type of search you're performing? I'm not quite following, as it seems you are saying you are doing a search for your client's own business name and location in Google's main search engine and that this is bringing up completely unrelated businesses instead of your client's business. This should not be happening, and I'm actually wondering if this isn't what you mean by your description. Please clarify if you can.

It would be best if you could actually show me the search and results, but if you can't do that, further description would help a little. I'll look forward to your reply!

Sure, Pete. One thing ... obviously, we've had a shift in emphasis toward the user-as-centroid vs. the industry centroids mentioned in the above blog post. Thought I should mention.

Ah, good to know we've narrowed this down together! For another reporting method, I'd tweet GMB @__GoogleMyBiz__ and link to your GMB forum post. If you do succeed in getting Google to edit the spammed names, I would love to hear what you see happen in the local pack after that. It may/may not affect rankings, so your experience would be educational to our community if you can share it. It's been a pleasure chatting with you about this.

Hi SEOSponge,

I need to provide a dissenting opinion here. I think the page you've linked to absolutely violates Yelp's guidelines and that they would definitely have a problem with it. To quote David Mihm's recent awesome piece on review filters and, particularly, Yelp (totally recommend you read this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/review-filters-in-local-search

• Don't ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
• Don't ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.
• Don't ask anyone to review your business on Yelp.

That pretty much sums it up, and I feel that Yelp would find this commercial cleaning company's page to be a violation of that. Google is getting stricter, too, with each passing year.

I recommend that you read David's piece and, in particular, that you follow the links he provides to the guidelines of each of some of the major review players. Some platforms do not appear to care if your encourage reviews, but others definitely do, so if you're considering creating a page like the one you've pointed to, I would recommend only including those platforms that aren't so dead set against review solicitation.

An alternative that might be worth considering is to not ask at all, but to use your strong review profiles for bragging rights; i.e. 'Check out our 5 star reviews on X'. That way, incoming customers are made aware that you have review profiles, but you're not asking for anything. This might be a safer way to go. But, if you do want to go with a 'Submit A Review' page, definitely don't put Yelp on it, and carefully read the guidelines of other entities to see if you feel safe including them.

Hope this helps!