Just because Google has policies you don’t like or are resistant too, I would suggest taking two beers and reconsidering.

I am not suggesting that you send every customer or send any whose time or energy will be wasted… I am suggesting that Google is a critical piece of the mix and that you need to see if you can find a tactic that gets you the occasional review there.

What I am suggesting is the following. This is basically what I have always suggested. Give your clients A CHOICE…. say Citysearch, Yahoo, Insider Pages, Yahoo and Google. Explain to them that they should pick which one to use that is most convenient for them… For example many will find CitySearch users a Facebook login… and many already have Yahoo logins so they should go there. Explain that unless they have already left a number of reviews at Google and/or are dedicated Google users they should probably go elsewher but if they want to they can leave you a review at Google.

You don’t need many Google reviews to be successful. You need one every other month or once a quarter. If you can segment out your clients so that self select at roughly that rate then you will have the best of all worlds…. The client will feel like you gave them lots of choice, Google will publish the occasional review and your business will continue to look good to customers at Google.

You DO NOT need to follow my advice. But in the end, the issue is about finding a long term successful strategy not getting pissed at Google.

Google has said what they are going to say. The bottom line is that however you are doing it or whatever person is leaving reviews Google thinks that it is a solicited review or spam.

I think that you are not going to get more answer than I just gave you. Should you give up on Google? No but you should de-emphasize them so that 1)you get reviews everywhere and 2) you are only asking 1 reviewer (who is already a loyal Google user) every month or two to leave you a review.

At this point I am ready to give up and ask my customers to avoid Google and go to Yelp. it is not worth all of the brain damage. does anyone at Google care enough to help? or should I just move on?

I USED to flag those reviews as bogus, and found a pretty large link network once where they were reviewing a certain type of business that had locations all over the place. I sent a long drawn out message of how they were all interlinked in the flagging message, and eventually all the reviews were removed and the other company’s listings dropped.

But it gets to be too much, I think I spent 8 hours just on that one client location alone digging up all the interlinked reviews and then coming up with an message. The reason I spent so much time on it, was because they were leaving negative reviews on some places, leaving a bogus good review is bad enough, but leaving a bogus bad review, is something that really gets my goat.

That’s why I’m kind of on board with the whole, tracking GPS or whatever they might use to validate reviews.

Marc

“say reviewing from Los Angeles, California for a business with an area in the Twin Cities area. it would be a red flag that its a bogus review”

That looks exactly like a fiverr review account! LOL

I used to check the google review, review history and I’m telling you those folks are rich! I saw one review who reviewed his plumber in Dallas TX and then later that morning show how managed to get up to New York and review his kitchen remodeler THEN flew back to California to inspect and rate his roofing contractor! Busy guy aye?

That’s exactly what I think is going to happen, they already track GPS from the street view car that drives around, they also know wifi hotspots from it.

They want people to check in everywhere, they have Google Offers GPS enabled so if its on your phone it pops up a notification that you are close to somewhere with an offer. If you have an android device and its logged into your Google account and you go somewhere and check in(or not) they still know you were there because the phone can poll for offers or check in locations anyway.

The next step is to just use all of that information to “validate” that you were near the GPS coordinates of the address of whatever business that you are reviewing.

I for one think that it’s a good idea. it will cut down on fake reviews from places like fiver and the like. it would be a more accurate way of policing it.

Someone tried to poke a hole in my theory on this about excluding service based businesses because you dont go to their office address… Google has been pushing for service based businesses to use a Service area for quite a while, and they have even de-listed/penalized some for listing a pinpoint location. if they do have a service area radius and you are reviewing the business and you are not in the service area or close to it, say reviewing from Los Angeles, California for a business with an area in the Twin Cities area. it would be a red flag that its a bogus review

What *could* be doing Google ? Check every Google request made by the user to check he did went to France, maybe even more… Nobody knows what Google is doing when investigating reviews.