Mike Blumenthal

Google has confirmed that anonymous reviews have in fact been removed from public view. Their statement to me: “We do not allow anonymous reviews today and we’ve removed legacy anonymous reviews.” If you recall, on May 24th, I reported their disappearance with the article Google Stops Counting Anonymous Reviews?. Given the obvious angst that many small …

Update: Over the weekend many of these “A Google User Reviews” were removed from the corpus as well as the count. I just got this email from my favorite pet client, Barbara Oliver. She watches her reviews like a hawk and is very protective of them: I noticed today that I have 139 google reviews …

There was an interesting article on CBC Canada this past week and it  encapsulates the range of problems that Google has not yet confronted in the review space- including but not limited to buying reviews, negative SEO reviews, review pile ons etc etc etc.: Kensington Market restaurant inundated with hundreds of 5-star reviews accused of buying …

Reviews, reviews and more reviews. Jason Brown of ReviewFraud participated in an interesting investigative news report on fake reviews. He wrote about it on his blog: Bulletproof Digital busted selling Fake reviews to NBCLA.  Here is NBC Southern California report: Who’s Really Behind Fake Online Reviews? Jason also covered an interesting story in the review space …

With help of Jason Brown, a fake review critic, I was invited to speak with WXYZ reporters while in Detroit last month on the issue of fake reviews and their impact.

Consumers have long been fans of reading reviews but have been reticent to actually write reviews. It seems from my longitudinal surveys that that attitude is steadily changing. I was surprised to see the near linear increase in self reported review write AND to learn that those over 65 are just behind 25-35 year olds …

Conversations with Joy Hawkins, Priya Chandra and Sergey Alakov surfaced some odd behaviors with the new “Reviews from the web” Knowledge Graph feature. These 3rd party reviews were sometimes appearing and other times not when the Knowledge Panel was displaying. After some testing, I determined that the specific query and its degree of relatedness to …

Yelp reviews, after showing briefly in the new “Reviews from the web” area of the Knowledge Panel, have once again disappeared from site. It would seem that TripAdvisor aggregate reviews are also conspicuously absent. Google must work on the premise of ask for forgiveness not permission. Unfortunately it does not appear that Jeremy Stoppleman (of delete …

Google announced the inclusion of expert opinions and top 10 list data into local search results. For now its appearing on restaurants but I assume that it can and will show more widely as Google figures out how to assign these sorts of results to other entities. These results are currently on mobile browsers and …