Hey There!

It sounds like a new GMB listing is in order to me. Like you, I'm a Local SEO, but without having complete knowledge of the situation, I'm making a general guess instead of giving informed advice. It's not unheard of for marketers to pay to consult with others marketers when in doubt. If, with the business' whole scenario before you, you're not 100% convinced you know the right course to set, it could be invaluable to to reach out to someone else in the industry and offer to pay for their time to consult with you while looking at the actual business and its history and goals. In your shoes, if I wasn't sure my advice was perfect, that's what I'd do

Hi Mike,

If the numbers exist anywhere, Google can decide to pull them. You should search Google for the existence of these phone numbers anywhere on the web (just to be sure they're not only in the PDFs) and then remove those numbers if having them pulled by Google in this manner is having a negative enough impact. Eventually, you should see them drop off.

Hi GSO!

Nice of you to say about my articles. I'm grateful:)

Yep - the remarks of Darren/Calen/Greg are pretty much along the lines of what I am saying about unverified businesses ranking. While I'm not aware of any actual dedicated study that has been done of this, I think all of us have seen those unverified businesses ranking well, but to me it always seems kind of without rhyme or reason why they are. To be honest, I sometimes suspect that it may be owing to some sort of 'laziness', for lack of a better word, on Google's part and that those unverified businesses are in danger of being knocked down by new competitors who are more on the ball. So, while I wish there was a comparison study I can point to, I'm afraid I'm left with gut feelings like the smart guys you've quoted. I do believe it's important to claim your listing, for a variety of reasons, but I can point to instances in which my gut feeling doesn't prove out! Kind of weird, huh?

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 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 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 Red Nova,

While, unfortunately, I don't know how to resolve this, I do know there is a Google and Your Business forum thread open right now on this topic. I would highly suggest adding your own query to that thread. The more people that respond to it, the better the chances of getting a response from a Google staffer with a suggested solution. Here's the thread:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/analytics|sort:date/business/Ab_sPzkwTBg/02Dm0hAIfo4J

The issue is pretty new - I'm sorry not to have a easy fix for you, but I hope the link will at least get you talking with others who are having this problem, and perhaps some of our community members will contribute here if they've found a fix. I hope so!

Hi Ryan,

That's a difficult situation! Usually, what I've found in this situation is that you have to spend an hour or two backtracking to discover where the name of one business is being conflated with the address/phone/website of the other. This might exist on the company's website or website, or it might exist in citations, or elsewhere. In many cases, this type of conflation is what has caused the confusion on Google's part. It's really important when you have a franchise that you've done everything you possibly can to differentiate the various branches, including different addresses, phone numbers, landing page URLs or websites, content, citations, etc. Even then, Google can sometimes become confused about this scenario and begin merging down details. So, if you can backtrack to a source for this confusion and correct it, that may resolve the issue.

You can also try to contact Google directly about this (go here and click the contact us button https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639) but you may very well get the answer, "That result is generate algorithmically and we can't do anything about it." Might be worth a try anyway.