Google Maps is now soliciting input from users as to whether reviews that are listed for a business are useful.
There has been an on-going discussion at convertoffline.com whether the recent purging of CitySearch reviews reflects a new effort by Google could to develop a way of indentifying more trust worthy reviews based on the number of reviews that a reviewer has provided. While that may or may not be the case Google appears to definitely be making an effort to determine review quality from user input by soliciting that information directly.
In the past Google has used review quantity not review quality as a critical ranking factor. Maybe that is changing.
[...] Are some reviews more powerful than others? As Mike Blumenthal recently pointed out in his post about Google Maps reviews, Google initially seemed to be placing greatest importance on the number of reviews a business had. For example, if restaurant #1 had 20 reviews and restaurant #2 had 47 reviews, the expected result would be that restaurant #2 would rank higher. However, over the past few days, the talk has been that it may be the quality not the quantity of reviews that is carrying new degrees of weight with Google. [...]
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