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Hi Sean,

I'd be wary of inferring too much from one week's worth of results. Depending on the site, a 3% variation could just be weekly fluctuations.

A few things might help shed some light on the situation:

When did you make the changes? It's possible that you can rule out your changes as the cause of the differences by figuring out if the search engines have indexed them yet.

I'd take a look at Google Analytics in depth and see if there's any kind of weekly/month variance across at least a year of data. Maybe the first week of the month gets more traffic historically - unfortunately I've found SEOmoz doesn't provide data back far enough to catch this kind of thing.

I'd also use GA to compare month-to-month traffic and see if there are any keywords or phrases that are receiving less traffic for each portion of the month.

Have you seen any ranking changes? There's a slight difference in URLs receiving entrances compared to last week. These might account for a drop off if a page has stopped ranking for a specific phrase. I'd be surprised if you lost traffic by removing those duplicates you mentioned, as it's less common for duplicate pages to rank twice for the same result, or for them to rank differently for different results.

Again, it could easily just be normal variation, but the above things are where I would start.

Do not consider the application of rotating software. Additionally SEOmoz congregation doesn't facilitate application of these leverages.

Recompose the articulation and that will facilitate goodness you more.

(or, +1 William)

How many locations are there in total, Tony?

Hi Cesar,

It might be too late, but you should check to see if Google has even crawled that page yet (check out the cache, and whether or not your changes are showing up in the SERPS).

Can you be specific about what you mean by "Meta titles"? Do you mean title tags?

Title tags will certainly have an effect on your ranking. Meta descriptions and keywords will not (though the former will certainly affect click-through rates).

If you are talking about title tags, can you tell us what you changed them to? and what they were before?

Are there any other issues or changes that might affect rankings? For which phrases did the rank drop happen?

Hi Yvonne,

You're talking about three very different services when you look at Localeze vs. UBL vs. web-listings.net

Localeze and UBL are local-search oriented. They focus on distributing core business NAP (Name, address, phone) information to local search providers.

Getting this information consistent and widely distributed is critical for local search rankings. Both UBL and Localeze well-respected platforms that offer a solid and important service. There are nuances which make them different, but for the purposes of this discussion, they're both a way to get your NAP out to maps and local search providers.

Services like web-listings.net are completely different. They're offering to "submit your website URL to 20 Search Engines with up to 8 keywords or key phrases." this is, in my opinion (and I believe a widely shared one) outdated and a waste of time, if not downright harmful.

So what are you trying to do here? Get directory listings for backlinks to your site? Or distribute NAP information to the local search providers, to rank in local search?

I agree with Jeremy. If they don't want to list their home address, and don't have an address they can serve people at, like an office, then hide it. Google seems to be calling more often recently to see if businesses can serve people at the location listed.

Luckily, there no longer seems to be a ranking penalty for hiding your address. http://blumenthals.com/blog/2010/11/03/google-places-search-hiding-address-no-longer-buries-listing/

Hi David,

Can you clarify what you mean by "Sit under"?

Do you want the places listing to display barrettsteel.com as the web address?

Or, do you want the listing to show barettsteel.com as the web address and show up above the "normal" (non-local) result?

I'd check out whether Google still has the linking pages cached before making a decision (at least some of them). If Google has recrawled them since they went "dead" you may not have a decision to worry about

Are the sites completely irrelevant and spammy, or decent but completely off topic?

Hi George,

I recently had a bad experience with a related posts plugin - I had a client site go down for a few hours, and had to deactivate it because it was causing too much CPU load. Apparently most related posts plugins run multiple queries multiple times, which is hard on the server.

(Maybe someone with more server/MySQL experience can provide a good explanation as to why this is).

I ended up going with the "Efficient Related Posts" plugin as a replacement. It seems to be working fine so far, and we've had no more issues with CPU usage. It sounds like it will do what you want as well:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/efficient-related-posts/

This is only based on my experience, though, so please take the recommendation with a grain of salt - test first!

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the response. I did check the rank tracking software when I saw it, and unfortunately it's not what's causing the problem.

It's not causing massive traffic changes to the site - somewhere in the realm of 5% to 15% depending on the month. It's still a decent chunk of people, though.

I agree with imageworks...

Your service area settings on your places page should reflect how the business actually interacts with customers. Prior to something like 18 months ago, hiding your location seemed to negatively impact listings. These days, my experience is that there is little, if any, penalty to doing this.

That said, even if there is a slight penalty to hiding the location, I'd do it anyway. As recently as February and March of 2012, Google seemed to be enforcing this particular guideline by actually calling some businesses and asking. A minor penalty is better than having your listing vanish along with all traffic.

Miriam Ellis wrote a post about this in March: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap

Hope this helps!

Hi Arthur,

It sounds as though "Option A" is being generated by an already-existing Yellow Pages listing with incorrect information?

If so, I think you should deal with the Yellow Pages issues first. You should also track down all the other data sources that might be providing incorrect information to Google. I highly recommend David Mihm's "Local Search Ecosystem" which you can find here: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/local-search-ecosystem-2012/

Here's the thing, though. They're not true duplicate listings if they have different addresses. You may have some issues getting them merged until you can update the data. So, once you've dealt with the upstream data providers, I'd go ahead and modify the incorrect listing without claiming it, making it match the correct listing perfectly. Once you've done that, you should have more luck with the merging process.

My opinion is that claiming both listings is **not **the way to go. Having two listings for the same location in your account is in violation of the Google guidelines, and I see no advantage to it. Instead, you should follow this process order to merge duplicate listings: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183009

As for which listing to chose as the primary - that's a tough one. Did you say that Option B is already ranked #1? If so, I'd probably go with that one, but only once everything else has been fixed.

In summary:

1. Correct the upstream data providers that are causing the problem. Try to track them all down
2. Modify the incorrect listing so it is identical to the correct one
3. Claim one of them - I'm thinking the one that's ranked #1, but someone else may disagree
4. DON'T claim the second one. Instead, follow the Google guidelines to report a duplicate listing.

About two months ago we dealt with some issues that were causing weak rankings in Bing and Yahoo! since then, we've seen rankings rise and plummet dramatically with no changes to the site.

On Bing and Yahoo! we've gone from 1st page to less than 50th and back again THREE times. This happens across all keywords, even branded ones that are an exact-match for the domain.

Google rankings have continued to rise steadily. We benefited greatly from Penguin, which tanked a number of competitors.

Bing webmaster tools aren't showing any server or other kinds of errors during the rank drops.

Has anyone every experienced this before?

If you can nail down a date that you saw a specific rankings drop, it would help to diagnose the issue - 24th is when Penguin rolled out. I believe the most recent Panda version happened on the 19th. Anything before that may have been Panda, too.

Would you be comfortable sharing the URL?

Out of interest, when did your rankings drop?

We just got a new client because of recent Penguin/Panda changes.

A national "SEO"  firm decided it was a good idea to set up a page for each service town or county they serve with nothing but duplicate content. Needless to say, on the week of the 23rd, their rankings tanked from 1st page (it's not a competitive niche) to 4th.

I'm not bringing this up to brag, but rather because it got me thinking...

How are your geographically targeted "service area" pages doing? Have the recent changes caused you to rethink your geographic targeting in any way?

I've always gone with Xenu, though I've heard good things about the already-mentioned Screaming Frog.

Dr. Pete did a nice comparison last year of the two:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog

Someone might disagree with me, but I don't think it will be an issue. To some extent, it seems to me that what you're describing happens pretty regularly anyway.

Take, say, the Thesis theme for WordPress. Hundreds or even thousands of people use it. I'm sure there are businesses out there that use the same basic navigation (Home, About Us, Services, Contact) and who don't customize it very much. That means that the only significant difference is the content. I haven't ever heard of this being a problem.

A similar (though not identical) situation occurs sites my company develops for our clients  We start the coding on many of them with the TwentyTen/Eleven themes, as they provide a solid base. While the sites look totally different, the core pieces of the code, the majority of the classes and ID's, the HTML structure, are the same. The only real difference is the CSS. Again, because they're small/medium businesses, they often have very similar navigation structure. So far we haven't had any trouble ranking them.

Anecdotal evidence that doesn't fit your situation perfectly, I know, but my gut feeling is that you'll be fine so long as the content is unique.

From a user experience, you might want to consider at least convincing him to change any photos out. Nothing says cloned site like identical images.

Hi hfranz,

Totally frustrating to find pages like that, isn't it? If I read your response right, you can't find where those rogue "Page" pages are being linked to from, so you can't fix the problem?

You could try and give it a crawl with Xenu (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html). It should be able to tell you which pages are linking to the rogues.

Once the crawl has run (tell it you don't need a report) right click on the links you want to dig into, and select "URL Properties". At the bottom of the window that pops up, it will say "# Pages Linking To This One" and give you a list of the URLs that link to that page.

e.g. find www.example.com/blog/page/13/ on the results, right click > URL Properties and then look for the pages that link to it. If you're having trouble seeing the link visually, then view source and ctrl+F (or the Mac equivalent) to find it.

It's a place to start tracking down the problems, at least. Someone more familiar with Yoast will have to chime in on how to fix it (if it's a Yoast problem) but you could always just remove the links to the rogue pages, since they don't sound critical.

Hope this helps!

Hi Again,

The (Not provided) category isn't showing up in March 2011 because they only started obscuring data from logged in users in October of 2011. This might account for at least some of the traffic difference between 2011 and 2012.

I think this is the blog post that they announced the change via:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html

You can potentially get some idea of what terms the (not provided) traffic is coming in on by looking at the landing page. You can also use PPC data, but I'm a little fuzzier on how that is done as AdWords isn't something I use a whole lot of.

Have you looked into long-tail traffic yet, or the traffic being generated by (not provided) search terms?

I've found word clouds to be useful at analyzing changes in long-tail traffic. If you can pull April and  March search terms into two different spreadsheets, then use something like Wordle you can get a really generalized overview of your long-tail makeup.

Similar to RankSurge's answer - The other thing you might want to consider is if the format of the SERPs has changed. Are there video, photo, local, or other universal results-or rich snippets-that didn't used to show up alongside your site?

I think you should be good leaving it alone, then.

You could put rel=canonical on the post page only (don't put it on the tags or category pages) but that might be more trouble than it's worth, depending on the restrictions imposed by the CMS.

Hi Pantelis,

I think that whether or not this is a problem, and how it should be fixed, depends on how your blog is set up.

The guide Justin mentioned is a good resource. Before you jump in, I think you should consider these questions:

When you go to domain.com/blog/seo etc. are the posts excerpted, or are full posts being displayed?

When someone clicks on the title of a blog post having found it under a tag (e.g. going to domain.com/blog/marketing and clicking on one of the posts) what URL is being displayed for the individual post?

e.g. is it domain.com/blog/seo/great-post-1 or is it domain.com/blog/great-post-1 ?

What really matters for duplicate content and canonicalization is whether the URL for the individual blog post is unique.

If the blog post has one unique URL, no matter how you get to it, and if the tags pages are displaying excerpts, then the only place you should be using rel=canonical is on the blog post itself. I think putting rel=canonical on a tags page that's only displaying titles and excerpts is asking for trouble. I don't like the idea of the search engines potentially thinking that your tag page, which has partials of many posts, is the original source.

If you're displaying full blog posts on the tags pages, then the solution is probably to switch it to excerpts and canonicalize only the individual blog posts.

Reference the SEOmoz blog: The SEOmoz.org/blog page doesn't use rel=canonical, and only displays excerpts, while seomoz.org/blog/post-title uses rel=canonical and displays the full post.

Completely agree with Mark about the PPC. Someone suggested it to me when I asked a similar question about local search, and I found it worked pretty well.

I've had some luck with SEMrush at smaller traffic volumes - I'm not sure I'd call it really accurate, but it seems to work fairly well as a guide when Google can't do it.

Sometimes the "related searches" option in plain old Google search can unearth some good starting points if you're looking for variations on phrases A and B, since you know they drive the right kind of visitor.

They're different products, and I don't think they serve the same role, so they're hard to compare.

Yext is more about listing management and control. Localeze and UBL are more about hitting upstream data providers and getting full coverage. They're best used in some sort of combination, so I don't think this is an either/or choice.

I can talk from recent experience about UBL and Yext. Less so about Localeze because I've never used the enhanced listings product. Maybe someone else can chime in on that one.

The results we have seen with UBL have been mixed. Initially we were happy with the service. Although we found that it tended to create some duplicates if we weren't incredibly careful, the distribution was good. Recently (the past 6 months) we've seen more duplicates happen due to UBL, and in some cases data doesn't appear to have been distributed at all. This is only my own experience, though, so perhaps I ran into issues that don't normally happen.

Yext was nice to use, and I think it's valuable in that it's offering rapid access and changes via what they describe as a custom API.  It's much easier to update data quickly, and it seems to have a pretty solid selection. On the flip side, it's expensive for small businesses, and, again, doesn't hit the upstream data providers.

(also, recent review on Yext by Mike Blumenthal here: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/01/yext-local-seo/)

I've only ever used Localeze to ensure the upstream data is accurate and to avoid duplicates. At the very least, I think you have to involve the regular version in order to get the data consistent.

So, personally, I'd deal with the upstream data from Localeze and infogroup etc. manually, wait for it all to settle out, and then consider Yext as a way to manage some of the major portals.

Hope this helps.

To me, that's not what your 404 page is for. I wouldn't recommend doing it. What happens if they typo something, or hit a bad link some other way? There's no message to tell them what happened and it creates a confusing user experience.

Better, in my opinion, to redirect the file individually

Arti, there's a good article on SEOmoz about redirects. Down the bottom, there are some how-to guides on how to do things like 301's. Just be careful of infinite loops if you're using apache.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

Just throwing out some thoughts here...

Is it possible that your claiming the local directory listing propagated a duplicate listing to a major platform (e.g. Superpages > Google) which busted your clickthrough rate?

Or was the traffic coming in from national search queries and not local ones? Any discernible rankings drop, or traffic loss to a keyword group?

Google's Venice update, maybe? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

I've seen some local companies start to rank for non-geographic search terms due to this update.  Because local companies are ranking, non-local companies have been bumped down the list.

Decent post on that here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update

Definitely eliminate personalization, as alsvik said. Beyond that, though, there are still other factors (Location, I.P address etc.) that you need to account for.

The best way I've found to handle it is to forget the idea of a "true reading". There are too many variables to eliminate in the real world. Instead, keep your measuring consistent and prove value that way. If you measure in the same way each time you can demonstrate an increase or decline in rankings, because the variables will always be the same

The various tracking tools, while not perfect, will eliminate some of the variables, and will certainly give you a consistent read each time.

From a client management perspective, it's more about setting client expectations than anything else. You need to discuss the fact that results may be slightly different when they check. You also need to explain why.

Once you've done that, you need to get your client to agree to the process you'll be using to track rank. If you use SEOmoz rank tracker, or Raventools, or whatever else, then get their buy-in that that platform is the one you'll be using to measure the effectiveness of your work . If you don't, you're likely to end up playing the "I'm not ranking where you say I am" game.

Edit: If you're tracking rank manually, then consider looking for something like the Bruce Clay toolbar, which will let you run searches via proxy.

Hi andymisiu,

Unless I'm misunderstanding, you're looking at the editor in Visual and HTML view, and only seeing [table id=2 /] instead of the HTML table it generates?

If I'm correct, that's perfectly OK. What you're seeing in the editor isn't exactly what's being displayed to someone who visits your site (or to the search engines).

The [table id=2 /] is a WordPress shortcode that basically says to WordPress "when you generate this page, call display the table 2". Even when you switch to HTML view in the WordPress editor, it's still only going to show you the shortcode, as it's not going to display the final HTML until someone visits the URL.

What matters is what's showing up in the page source when someone visits the URL (e.g. after WordPress has processed the short code). You can can check that by going to the URL (published or via preview) and viewing the page source. I've used WP Tables Reloaded before and my experience is that the HTML it produces is fine.

Hope this helps!

If your homepage isn't attempting to rank for "in Chicago", "in New York" etc. then I don't see an issue with cannibalization as such.

That said, I'd be wary of the tactic in general, unless you have offices in those areas. My experience has been that you'll be underwhelmed with the results if "Service in New York" etc. is triggering local search results when you don't actually have an address to go on those pages.

If you do have multiple locations, then creating a page for each address is definitely the way to go.

Thanks for the response!

Digging in further revealed that Bing has indexed only a handful of the new structure, while retaining old pages, including an old index.html - time to implement some redirects methinks.

I'm finding this very odd - I know  bing indexed the new homepage, but it's now gone, replaced by index.html. Aside from redirects, I believe I'll go and try to track down links to index.html and get them changed.

Webmaster tools access is being problematic, but I'm working on that now. Oh the joys of having two companies in the mix...

Thanks Alan!

Good to know about the "trying it out" part. I wasn't aware of that one.

Think it's worth my time to submit through BWMT, or should I not as the site is already indexed?

I also spotted that Bing has the old index.html still indexed, which is odd, because last week it showed the domain.com as the homepage. I'll try implementing a 301 from index.html to domain.com and see how that goes.

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your response. Normally, I'd be happy to provide the URL. Ironically, this is the only time we've ever worked with an NDA in place. Because of that, I'm uncomfortable sharing it. I know that limits the help people can provide.

That said, I'm operating on the assumption that this is more of an algorithmic change than an on-page issue. Here's why:

• Neither the content or the structure of the site has changed since Bing last crawled. Even so, I've re-checked the structure, for noindex/nofollow tags, the functionality of robots.txt., as well as the content, and anything else I can think of. I'm not finding any issues.

• The site has been very slowly climbing in rankings since late January, with Bing/Yahoo! crawling it multiple times since then.

• The drop is site-wide, but in contacting Bing, I'm told it is indexed, and there are no "blocks that would affect your site's rank".

• Finally, other people on Webmaster world and SEOroundtable are mentioning rank drops as well.

Do you think I'm wrong to make this assumption?

If not, have you or anyone else heard or seen anything about the ranking changes that I and others appear to be experiencing? (As mentioned in the article above from SEORoundtable)

Cheers!

On March 27th I noticed a huge rankings drop across the board on a client site in Bing and Yahoo! After some research, I found this article on SEOroundtable (it also links back to a Webmaster World discussion).

For this particular site we're talking a few dozen of keywords dropping off the first page, or even from the first page dropping out of the top 50. The only thing not affected were brand keywords.

The site was recently relaunched, and has a fairly weak backlink profile right now. It doesn't use keywords in the domain (which was one of the things identified in the SEOroundtable article).

Has anyone else noticed changes? If so, what do you attribute them to and how are you combating them?

Just throwing this out there, but, could rel=canonical be augmented or assisted in this case by URL parameters in webmaster tools?

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

I'm curious what tactics people are finding successful in converting readers into leads, inquiries, or sales.

Anyone feel like sharing?

When dealing with local search for a business with multiple locations, I've always created an individual page for each location.

Aside from the address and business name being in there, I also like to make sure the title tag and other important markup features the state/city/suburb, or, in the case of hyper-local, hyper-competitive markets, information more specific than that. It's worked very well so far.

But, the one thing you can always count on with Local is that the game keeps changing.

So I'd like to hear what you think... How do you deal with multiple locations these days?

Has Google (and others, of course) advanced far enough to not mess things up if you put multiple locations on the same page? (Do I hear snickers? Be nice now)

How does Schema.org fit in to your tactics in this area, if at all?

Cheers

(Edit: dear SEOmoz, stop eating my line breaks)

Ah, I see.

That has happened, but only to a very small extent - when I look at analytics, I can attribute  70%+ of the dropoff to a two-word phrase with 3 variants. It was their primary phrase by a good margin, and the traffic has tanked, even though they maintain rankings for it. It's very confusing.

I did notice on insights that in 2010 and 2009 there were a few months of each year where insights went from very high interest to 0 interest. It's happening in 2011, too, and we're currently in one of those periods. The start of that 0 period in insights coincides roughly with the traffic dropoff.

That said, I'm wary of deciding that that's the reason. There -were- changes to the title tags and content at that time, and it's hard to believe that it's just bad luck .

The primary traffic source for this phrase was Yahoo, not Google. The traffic drop has occurred in Google, but to a much lesser extent (Yahoo dropped about 50%. Google only dropped about 20%). Another reason for me to not want to give too much credence to the insights info.

Thanks for the reply EGOL, I appreciate it.

I understand what you're saying about being optimized for eliciting clicks. I'm a little confused about what you mean by "poorly optimized for SERP position competition" given that they're still ranking #1 for the terms where the traffic drop has occurred, I'm assuming you don't mean ranking, so could you clarify that part a bit?

Thanks!

I didn't think to do this before I posted, but I checked out Google insights and there are portions for the past 3 years where the interest for these brand-name terms drops to 0 in the space of one month. Anyone know if this is an issue with Google data/insights, or if this might be a reliable indication of something happening in the world rather than just the site?

Cheers

Hey folks,

I recently noticed a very large drop in brand-name traffic (in the realm of 50%) which coincided with some SEO changes to target non-brand-name searches. Thing is, the site is still ranking #1 for all the brand-name searches that the traffic drop happened in. (checked terms via SEOmoz toolbar, and also proxy with Bruce Clay's toolbar).

Any thoughts on where to start lookingfor the problem or what might have caused it? If this hadn't happened at the same time as other changes, I'd put this down to non-SEO problems.

Good idea. Thanks!

I'd been kicking something similar around but hadn't thought about the details. Do you suggest going for geographically targeted campaigns, and use non-modified phrases, (i.e. a campaign that targets New York for the phrase "Computer repair") or actually using the city or town in the keyword you bid on (i.e. "New York Computer Repair)? Or both?

Does anyone recommend a particular keyword research tool or tools for geographically modified keywords? i.e. Web DesignerF Fargo.

I often find that searches focused on services in the area we serve does not get the traffic volume Google's keyword tool needs to provide me with a number. I know the traffic is there, because I see it coming in via analytics.

Thoughts? Recommendations?

If nothing is showing up at all in places, then my inclination would be remove both listings from your account and start over.

Only other thing I can think of is to raise a hue and cry in places help, and see if you can get the attention of a Google employee or a top contributor (who seem to be able to raise the attention of employees).

It should remove it from your account right away if you select the "remove from account" option. I just tried it with an old listing that is out of business on one of my accounts. It disappeared right away.

If it's not, hrm, tough one. Going to need to try a new account, or see if you can raise something in the help center (never had much luck myself).

If I understand your response correctly, you're the business is not being displayed at all when you search? (search for business name and also try a separate search for the phone number) Even with incorrect information?

If so, what's actually happening when you delete them from your account? Are they still showing up on the dashboard?

How is the business appearing in the results right now?

Are the two dupes both showing up as unclaimed listings? Are there other dupes that should be dealt with as well?

Depending on what's currently showing up, a flat-out "remove from Google maps" probably isn't your best solution. If there's conflicting data that Google is pulling from, at best it's going to be a temporary solution that will pop up the instant you tell your client "all fixed". At worst, it might suppress too many things, or suppress the wrong data.

I'd track down all the dupes that exist, AND where the upstream data that's causing them is coming from first. Then figure out whether there's any relationship between the pending listings and what's showing up (i.e. did someone attempt to claim already existing duplicate listings, or did they create them manually?). Once you've done that you should have a pretty good idea of what is what.

Unless you can get a miraculous intervention from Google Places help, removing them from your account and claiming already existing listings is probably what you'll end up doing. After you've cleaned up the upstream issues that messy data is causing.

Edits by users could be used to make sure the information on duplicate listings is completely identical. That's the one way I've managed to get Google to review duplicate listings and merge them via the "report a problem" link.

I'm looking into Linkresearchtools.com for competitive backlink analysis. Already have SEOmoz (obviously) and Majestic.

Anyone have any experience with the toolset? If so, what does it do well, what do you like, and where does it fall down?

Cheers

If you're looking for general monitoring across multiple platforms, I'm a fan of social mention. You'll probably need to figure out how to filter some of the junk out in your searches, though.

You get 50 report points for Hoostuite pro (at least I do for the cheapest $5.99 pro package). You can pull together a decent report with that. I believe you need to pay for extra points if you want to make more in-depth reports.

The Google FAQs about places and rich snippets (which you're going to generate by adding schema.org markup) says that they will not negatively or positively impact rankings. But...

I'm going to suggest that it almost certainly seems like they will, -if- you can get Google to pick them up from your site and add them to your places listing.

Obviously, the number of reviews that Google can pull from other local-portal sites is a ranking factor. In May, Mike Blumenthal wrote a blog post which identified places listings where he had seen Google including hreview testimonials pulled directly from the business's own website.

I'm skeptical that Google is going to treat these reviews differently from reviews from other sources, and somehow exclude them from their ranking algo for places. If Google didn't believe that the reviews are valid, then they wouldn't include them in the first place, because it would make for a really poor user experience. If they're not excluding them for user experience reasons, I doubt they'll exclude them from being a ranking factor.  Which means, to me, that (if you can get the picked up) they'll have a positive impact on rank.