I wouldn’t consider spreading love to the competition as punishing Google. I just don’t want to perpetuate the “Google is God” myth, lol. As to doing Places optimization work, I may still offer it, but I’m certainly going to be removing any implication of performance guarantee with all the see-sawing G is doing.

“Punishing” Google really ends up punishing you and the client that wants to use them. You by not having prominent footprint there. What if they change their algo? and I don’t agree that 3rd party is worth more than Google.

As to the client what if it is there favorite site?

Yes Mike I show our customers CitySearch, Insiderpages, DealerRater, Yelp, and Superpages. I stopped sending them directly to Google months ago after learning that the 3rd party site reviews were more likely to help GP rankings.

Agree Yahoo is diminishing rapidly but I will try to start utilizing them more, just like I am trying to shop more at Kmart. I like competition and would hate it if the world ended up being made of nothing but Google and Walmart.

Despite changes in the review landscape, for many types of businesses I still recommend these four review sites: Google, Citysearch (for its Facebook login), Yelp and although of declining import, Yahoo. Diversity, respect for customer choice, broad footprint are still the order of the day.

Many of our customers name the salesperson they dealt with and gave them high marks. So that is not the earmark of a fake review. The customer just happened to think the salesman was good to them and wanted to put that on record. Nothing wrong with that at all.

I’m hoping that Yelp and others don’t go overboard like Google (yes I know of Yelp’s history, but hopefully they have learned some moderation in the process). It really bites to have the best customer service policy in the county – bar none (we know it and our customers know it) – and be penalized because we got so many glowing (but very legit) reviews.

Uh-oh, here it comes.

Yes the “feedback” has already started in the forums:

We lost ALL (60) Google reviews, all were 5 out of 5 stars really setting us apart. It took a long time to get all those and they’re all legit. We have identified nearly every review for which customer it was and have an invoice, email, phone number, address to prove it. Other than asking for a review and explaining how to do it, there has never been involvement by anyone other than the customer in putting those review up in their own words, on their own time, their own computers, without ANY incentives.

It’s sickening to lose all that hard work and to top it off, our competitors who didn’t lose their reviews think all ours were fake now. How do we know? Because they’re telling potential customers this!