Google Places and Hotpot have had a rough run of bugs of late. It seems that barely is one fixed that another crops to the fore. This was reported to me on February 22 by Plamen. The first 40 characters or so of the review are lopped off. It appears to be affecting any review written since November 16:
Another screen shot from Byways Cafe in Portland:




This just keeps getting worse and worse. We have a client who’s reviews are getting replicated on a competitors profile. To make matters even more complicated the competitor has all 23 reviews our client does. Super frustrating stuff.
Comment by Dev Basu (24 comments) — February 25, 2011 @ 10:30 am
I’m really sick of this I have many many clients that have shorter reviews that show nothing because they seem to be less than the 40 characters being eaten! shit google
Comment by mike (2500 comments) — February 25, 2011 @ 7:38 pm
Glad to hear I’m not the only one, our law firm listing didn’t look very professional when the first “review” was just one word, the last one typed from a client referral that made no sense when viewed by itself. Hopefully this glitch gets fixed soon.
Comment by CJ (6 comments) — February 27, 2011 @ 4:26 am
I fall into the “I’m glad I’m not the only one” category. Was killing myself trying to figure out what I was doing wrong before I figured it was yet, another Places glitch, of which there seems to be more and more all the time.
Comment by Dino (11 comments) — February 27, 2011 @ 1:58 pm
This is certainly concerning, particularly since the business I work for has had nearly 100 1-star rating, suddenly post in the past 2 days, dropping our overall rating considerably. It doesn’t help that the process to “ask Google” to remove these blatantly junk reviews is automated to the point of being useless. If Google is going to have any success in the travel sector, they definitely need to be more responsive and quick to move on reviews – very disappointing!
Comment by Eric Hoffman (2 comments) — March 1, 2011 @ 4:56 pm
[...] MD Reviews tool we added the ability to track reviews posted in Google Places. Now Google has had tons of documented problems with the Hotpot and Google Places reviews and we imagine their problems will continue as Google [...]
Pingback by MD Reviews – Now Tracking Google Places | Plastic Surgery Web Marketing — April 6, 2011 @ 9:49 am