Google is now including reviews from more sources on its Place Pages for businesses. They won’t be coming from review sites only; they’re coming from news and blog sites.
Mike Blumenthal, writer for the Understanding Google Maps & Local Search blog, has an in depth analysis of the change and got confirmation about it from Google Maps Product Manager Carter Maslan.
“This change portends a dramatically changed review landscape where both the volume of reviews for some types of businesses will rise and the dynamics of reputation management will change. It could very well shift the balance of power away from centralized review sites and could be one more impediment to any recovery of the IYP sites,” says Blumenthal.
“Google Maps is now using the new capability of sentiment analysis to better understand content and add ‘reviews’ from non traditional sources like newspaper articles and single blog entries that appear across the internet,” he says. “This new capability will dramatically increase the reach of hyperlocal blogs, change how businesses manage the review process and could, over the long haul, change how and where reviews are generated and aggregated.”
It’s no surprise that Google wants to reach more sources for review, like content on Place Pages. Considering the breadth of information Google indexes, it’s pretty obvious that Google would bring together information about a business from a variety of sources. It is not particularly surprising that Google would reach to more sources for review-like content on Place Pages.
Given they offer customers a positive experience, Google’s inclusion of more sources in place Pages can benefit from this. It can be hard to get a good reputation if you don’t deliver something positive to begin with. This addition will make it harder for businesses to hide a bad reputation.