Google+Local Reviews have gone? Any ideas?

[ocelot]

Hi

Since Google switched places to Google+ Local lots of the reviews that were on the listing are no longer showing?

A customer of mine brought up the point when visiting the store today, when they are logged into Google they can see their review under Your Activity, however when they are logged out the only review is listed under 1 Review from everyone and the review is no longer being shown?

Any ideas on what is going on?

Also with local search / places optimisation has the best practice guidelines changed now that is transformed into Google+ Local?

If so it would be great to share any links on getting the most out of this new + local service

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Ocelot,

If the review you mention, above, is new, it could show up eventually. If not, it may have been filtered out. I believe Google is stepping up review filtering, in which case it will not show up because it has been filtered. I'm going to excerpt some data here for you from Mike Blumenthal's Q&A roundup about review changes relating to Google+ Local. Here is the full post:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/05/31/google-local-qs-and-some-as/

If a user just has a gmail account will they be able to write a review or must they also sign up for Google+?

They will need to sign up for Google +

So our customers are not able to leave reviews unless they are on Google+?

Yep, you need a Google+ account to write a review. See the help page.

Can reviewers leave anonymous reviews?

No. At this point it is real names only.

Is there any way to choose a nickname like we had in Places reviews?

No

Why am I not seeing the “Leave a Review” button?

These had been removed from the Places page in anticipation of this move and put on the new Google+Local page. If you are still not seeing the review button it is because you have landed on the old Place page which is still accesible.

**Why would Google make my re-publish old reviews while I’m trying to publish a NEW review for a different business? **

Why it happens at that point in the process was an intentional design decision. It is a one time process needed since Google is moving from anonymous and nicknamed reviews to full, real identity reviews . This necessitated some sort of user approval process to explicitly allow your user name to be seen or to choose to make the review private.

Oh Google, you are driving me CRAZY! Can you please tell me how a dentist can have a Zagat review rating on their places page?

In this case it will be a single number indicating quality on the 0-30 scale.

---

Best practices are roughly the same, but an increase in social engagement is definitely the direction things are going. I highly recommend that you read Mike Blumenthal's post on adjusting to the changes:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/0/08/google-for-business-places-forums-wrapup/

[ocelot]

Hi

There were two listings created for the same address, and it seems as though one has gone, which I can see why, because why have two versions.

Tthe question still remaining is why have all the reviews gone apart from one under Review from everyone

and all of the previous reviews from customers now only show under 'Your Activity' for that user when they are logged into Google?

Any ideas?

[bradkrussell]

Did you have two listings under the same address?

We operate a number of websites from the same physical address and when I tried to put 2 of them on Google Places/Local under the same address they started crossing over and eventually both listings were removed.

Big pain, especially as one of the businesses had a number of very old, very good reviews.