Comments on: Don’t Forget… Business Reviews Are Searchable

By: David Mihm

David Mihm — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 02:18:35 +0000

Thanks for the response, Tim.

In my experience, your point about older reviews being more “trusted” is 100% true. As for returning InsiderPages / CitySearch reviews before their own, it seems like this is more random to me than you suggest, but the Local algo seems to change on a daily basis, and maybe it is trending this way.

Happy Thanksgiving!

By: Local Search Hound

Local Search Hound — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 02:26:28 +0000

Thanks for the comment David. I almost agree exactly with what you said; I just couldn’t find any evidence of it.
What I did was locate businesses that were reviewed multiple times on multiple sites. I looked specifically for businesses that were reviewed on G maps and others then I did I search for that business + review. In each of a small sample of searches I found G returning Insider Pages and City Search over their own reviews.

Another factor here could be the age of the review, I believe Google gives more weight to older reviews. If that’s true and you are beginning a review strategy today, beginning with Google might be the best idea. But I think that might be an unnecessary gamble because G is clearly indexing and returning these reviews in their search results.

Thanks again for the comment David, this is a better post with this discussion.

By: David Mihm

David Mihm — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:59:31 +0000

Reviews are without a doubt the most important frontier in the Local / small business SEO space right now. I agree with everything this article has to say, but I think it leaves out a very important point:

Google is still the big dog in search, and the Map + 3 Listings shows up with increasing prevalence–almost 100% prevalence in some areas–for “(product/service) CITY, ST” search queries. The first place I’d start to encourage ANY local business to get reviewed on is Google Local itself. True, G is also pulling in reviews from the sources you list (Insiderpages, CitySearch), but I have to think that it’ll include reviews in its own database much, much faster than a third-party source.

You may have already discussed this in another blog post & if you have I’d love it if you sent me a link to that post, but I wanted to bring this up for small business owners for whom this might have been their first post related to online reviews.