Google Places Mobile: Is a Broad Rollout of Check-In Offers Imminent? In early March, Google rolled out Check In offers as a feature for Latitude in Austin. In April the feature was additionally made available to national retailers like Radio Shack and Quiznos. The feature was not made generally accessible to most retailers. At the time I inquired of Google when it would be available more widely and if it was free or paid. Google provided their all too frequent “We’ll let you know if and when we have more details to share” response. I managed to uncover some additional Mobile Check-Ins details in this recent Google Places Help Page: When users for businesses using Google for mobile devices, they’ll be able to access your Google Places Offer on their phone. You can also offer special deals to visitors if they check in online when they visit your business. Create a Mobile Check-in Offer All Google Places offers are created in both mobile and desktop formats, so all you have to do is create an offer.
Turn Off a Mobile Check-in Offer. Google Overhauls Place Pages, Emphasizes Reviews & Kills Citations. Local searchers and local businesses will see a fairly substantially different Place Page the next time they’re poking around Google Maps/Places. The company announced a new look Thursday and promises more changes to come. The new layout of Place Pages puts a heavy emphasis on reviews. More specifically, it emphasizes reviews from Google users and no longer shows review content from third party sites.
(Google had issues with both Yelp and TripAdvisor over review snippets last year, you may recall.) Rather than showing external reviews, the new Place Page only links to third party sites after showing a selection of Google user reviews. The Place Page will look slightly different depending on the type of business; for example, hotels and motels will have the “Book now” interface above the Photos section from Google’s Hotel Ads program. Google removed a couple important pieces of the old Place Pages, too: Related Topics: Channel: Local | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Place Pages | Top News.
Changes in Google Places and Reviews – What Does it Mean for the SMB? Google Places has once again “mixed it up” in the review arena. They are no longer showing the count for 3rd party reviews on the main search page and they are only displaying the count for Google reviews. They are still showing the link to the main 3rd party review sites on the main search results page but have removed the review snippets on all businesses except restaurants and hotels. Some businesses, Demand Force clients for example, will have seen a huge drop in the review count. You can bet that DF’s phones will be ringing of the hook with questions about the change.
On the Places page itself, Google is now highlighting with bold, bright red the option to leave a review, they no longer show 3rd party review snippets and the have pushed 3rd party review links well down the page and below the fold. Google is clearly reducing their reliance on third party reviews and increasing the prominence of their own reviews.
Will the Change in Status of 3rd Party Reviews Affect Rank in Google Places? Will the change in status of 3rd party reviews affect rank? This question was asked in 3 or 4 or perhaps 5 different ways over the past 24 hrs. There is a palpable sense of worry in the questions. The short answer: Who knows but I think not. Better yet, don’t worry about it. Here is an observation from Linda Buquet: From what I can tell this was ONLY a front end cosmetic change NOT a backend change that affects the algo or ranking. In some quick ranking checks I did last night, it appears the lack of 3rd party reviews showing up in the count DID NOT affect rankings. Same thing holds true for the lack of visible citations. For example: Dentists that have 200 DemandForce reviews often have 300 DemandForce citations.
Here is what the recently released Google Local Patent says that was published in September ’10 just before blended results hit the streets: Here is what I say: Google is looking to represent the most popular and relevant businesses to their searchers. Stop chasing the algo. Google Places Basics: How does Google create and maintain/add location records for their “Google Places” database? The question “How does Google create and maintain/add location records for their “Google Places” database?” Was asked recently at Quora. I am reproducing my answer here so that readers who are new to the blog can get some background information on Google Places from a high level view: Google obtains records for their business listings from the major list dealers like InfoUSA,feeds from trusted sources like CityGrid,scraping trusted structured websites like Superpages or BBB,scraping less trusted and less structured directories,user input via their MapMaker product and Community edit of unclaimed listings in Maps,across the web in general,and business claimed records via the Places Dashboard.
This data is essentially triangulated to create the Places search result. Every time that they identify a unique PHONE/business/address/ combo they create what is known as a cluster into which all structured and unstructured known data about a business is placed. Google Places: Reputation Management or Extortion in the Moving Industry? Most small businesses live in dread of the day when a competitor drops a nasty review on their Places page. Imagine waking up one day and finding 58 of them. That’s what happened to the Place Page for Moishe’s Moving Systems in NYC. For several days in early July they were finding one 1 star review after another showing up on their Places page. Imagine their sense of futility as they hit the “flag as inappropriate” link over and over again. A quick call to their competitors across town indicated the same was happening to them.
Not just the same pattern but the very same reviews, same bad English, same mispellings, often not even getting the company name correct. A search in Maps on the phrase “It really hurt me and I highly recommend that NOBODY DO BUSSINESS WITH THIS COMPANY>>>>>> and by the way all the locations they advertise with are 100% fake” surfaced the very same reviews on over 100 moving companies country wide from Miami to LA. Google Quickly Removes Most Review Spam in Moving Industry – More Remains at Google and Elsewhere. It appears that Google has removed most but not all review spam from the Moishe’s Moving System’s Places page and from many of the other Places pages affected by this scam.
On Moishe’s Places page, the spam that remains (besides their response spam) was posted between July 1 and July 3 and seems to still affect 35 or so other moving companies nationwide. Whether Google just removed the spam affecting the most companies or it is still a work in progress is not yet clear. Kudos to Google for moving on this problem. Here are a few samples of the spam that still remains and is affecting moving companies country wide: Another interesting sidelight is that Google is not alone in having been hit with this spam. Fake reviews are a problem whether perpetrated by the businesses themselves or by others attempting to gain advantage at the expense of the business. Google Places is not the only environment in which this abuse is taking place. TripAdvisor Sends Conflicted Message: We Can Incent Reviews but Business Can’t.
The review world is full of contradictions. Many review sites, TripAdvisor included, have strong penalties if a business is caught incenting reviews. The prohibition makes sense in that an incentive is likely to lead a reviewer to generate a low quality, less than thoughtful review in order to receive the incentive. There is also the question of whether the incentive was a “pay to play” arrangement that would create a conflict of interest between the reviewer and the business. Effectively the review would then be an advertisement rather than an objective review.
TripAdvisor is quite clear that there should be no incentives for a reviewer to review a business. I was offered an incentive for a review – is that ok? No. If TripAdvisor suspects faked or incented reviews the penalties they will “red flag” the listing with a large notice. I am not a fan of incenting reviews as the potential for backlash and bad publicity far outweighs the upside.
Read more: Google Offers Beta – Status Update. Google Offer’s Beta in Portland started on June 1 and there have been 5 deals in total to this point. Here is a summary of the deals to date: Other than the first deal at Floyd’s the volume has been very low to moderate. On the ground anecdotal evidence indicated that Floyd’s was not that busy so it is not unlikely that being the first deal, that many of the offers purchased were by those in the industry assessing Google’s product.
I guess Floyd’s won’t mind. Rocky Agrawal also noted that “the early ones get benefit of local press. In a conversation with one of the participants they shared with some interesting factoids: - They were paying Google 50% of the proceeds. Replicating Groupon’s success will not be quick and it will not be easy for Google. Please consider leaving a comment as your input will help me (& everyone else) better understand and learn about local. Google Offers beta starts in Portland, Oregon tomorrow. (Cross-posted on the Commerce, Places, Retail and Small Business Blogs) Portlanders know how to mix the urban (killer coffee, music and art) and the small-town (easy walking, biking and socializing). There’s no end to the city’s great restaurants, coffee shops, hot spots and places to explore. That’s why, when we started planning the Google Offers beta, we knew Portland was the ideal place to get it all kicked off. Today, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and VP of Commerce Stephanie Tilenius announced at the D9 Conference that we’re launching Google Offers beta in Portland, Ore. tomorrow.
Our first Google Offer will be from beloved local java shop Floyd’s Coffee. With Google Offers, we’re working with great local businesses like Floyd’s Coffee, Le Bistro Montage, Powell’s Books and Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade to help them reach more Portlanders. You can learn more about Google Offers and sign up at google.com/offers.
Google Officially Launches Business Photos For Google Places. For over a year now there were rumors of Google Store Views, a feature where Google will let people walk through your store as they come from Google Street Views. Nice idea but what it turned into was the official launch of Google Business Photos. Google Business Photos is where Google sends photographers to your business - for free - and takes pictures to be places in your photos and videos section of your Google Place page. You can see examples on this business. See the "from Google" pictures? Marissa Mayer of Google formally announced the program yesterday, as Greg Sterling reported: Today at the Social-Loco conference in San Francisco Google's Doyenne of Local Marissa Mayer formally announced Google Business Photos.
This is not a new product but the formalization of an offering that has been available in a more limited way since last year. Here is a video demo from Google on this service: You can apply for Google to take photos of your business over here. Google Places: Integrating some of the great information that’s been buried. With the rollout of the changes on the Places page and display of Local Universal results on the main search results page Google noted that going forward that they would be “Integrating some of the great information that’s been buried on Place pages into your web search experience across all Google platforms“. We had a discussion the other day postulating as to what Google Places and Maps data was “buried” and would surface.
Photos, Offers/Coupon offers, videos were a common suggestions in the thread. It seems that Google has already started down the path of more widely disseminating Offers (as in free Places Coupons as opposed to daily deals) with their recently updated Shopper App on the iPhone (thanks to Jim Gianoglio of ImpactQ for the tip). The noted changes clearly focus on Offers: Nearby offers giving users great deals around them Map view for nearby offers Redemption of Google Offers from your phone As Google noted in their post:
Google Places Search -Layout Experiments Continue. Whether Google is testing more on Thanksgiving or whether folks are searching more to avoid watching that football game with their relatives, I am not sure. But yesterday two readers of this blog sent me screenshots of different layouts involving Places search. Dennis Brennan sent me these screen shots showing the related searches appearing where the ads normally appear and the ads appearing at the bottom… Here is the bottom screen shot from the search showing the ads: Plamen, a frequent commenter, sent along this screen shot showing several One Boxes appearing in the search results below a 3-Pack. Please consider leaving a comment as your input will help me (& everyone else) better understand and learn about local.
Google Places Dashboard – There’s Good News and There’s Bad News. Did you ever hear the one about the Lieutenant in the trenches of WWI that called together his dispirited troops and announced:”Troops, I have good news and I have bad news. Would you rather hear the good news first or the bad news?”. The troops called out in unison: “Tell us the good news! We haven’t had any in such a long time!!”. The lieutenant says: “The Good News is that you finally get a change of underwear.” And the troops erupted with a wild cheer. “Now tell us the Bad News!” The Lieutenant responded: “Larry you get Joe’s, Joe you get Harry’s….”
The Google Places Dashboard has been a lot like that of late. What’s the bad news you ask? Here is an email that went out to the accounts: Subject: Important notification regarding your Google Places account Hello, We would like to inform you that your Google Places account will be affected by scheduled maintenance of our bulk upload experience. Please see the questions below for more information about how this will affect your account: Google Place Page Changes. Place Pages Sporting New Navigation Features. Places Odds and Ends. Google Places Help: Instructions Included for Multi-Language Listings Google has long noted that having the same listing in multiple languages was acceptable. If you were not extremely careful merging of the multi lingual listings might occur unless they had been bulk uploaded. Google has now updated the Places Help Pages to include instructions (if not warnings) as how to proceed: Multi-Language Listings In bilingual countries, it is possible to add your listing in each language spoken in that respective country.
If content of each language is very similar in only one field, such as describing ‘Most Famous Restaurant’, it’s possible to add each translation in every field. If the content needs to be translated in each field, business owners should create a listing for each language. Google Places Showing Related Places Twice On Page This started showing up yesterday in Places… a bug? Google Coupons Offers Now Showing in Maps List View. Places Verifying Business Listing Discrepancies with Owner. Google Maps On Android Go 3D And Offline. Google Testing New Look For Map Views. Google Places Search – Before and After Dashboard Analytics Comparison.
Google Testing 10 Pack Blended Results. Google Now Degrading Rankings Of Some Merchants With Poor Service. Google Maps On Android Go 3D And Offline. Google Places: Are Ratings the New Reviews? Google: Now Likely Using Online Merchant Reviews As Ranking Signal. Google Places Now Requiring New “Places Profile” For Reviews. Review Sites’ Rancor Rises With Prominence of Google Place Pages. Google Maps Paid Reviews Now Against Google's Guidelines. FTC Extracts $250,00 Fine for Affiliate Reviews & Endorsements. @JHuber – Head Of Local at Google, Needs Tweeting Ideas. GetListed Local University Grand Rapids. Google Places Blended Results – Photos MIA. Google Places Basics: How does Google create and maintain/add location records for their “Google Places” database? Google Places Dashboard: How to Make % Complete = 100% DeCarta Challenges Google With Free Mapping, Local Search Tools Aimed At Mobile Developers. Google Places Hack: Barnacle Marketing Goes Black. How to Use Google Places New RSS Feed To Automate Your Review Spam Farm.
Google Maps Reviews Spam Automation Techniques. Google Places and the Future. The Growth of Reviews In Google Places (aka Hotpot)