Unfortunately, several of the alternatives he is considering also are risky. Yahoo local, merchant verified listings are a joke. The upgrade is $10 per month for most businesses there is scant lead generation. Additionally, they are in bed with the YP and what you find in many cases is that somewhere along the line, YP has gained control of a business listing which locks out a business owner’s ability to claim and enhance. (and just try to get a hold of a person at YP who can resend their control, it is like entering a maze). Meantime, YP does nothing to maintain the listing, so outdated information, they make no use of adding content, photos and content. Truthfully, they are a poor excuse for a local search engine (directory) and where customer support arrogance is the norm – Finally, there is Bing, where publishing changes can take the better part of a year and there is no one to communicate with. We feel your pain Dan.

I don’t know that I agree with the tough love either. I’ve had merged listings, dupes and have less reviews on Google than I had a year ago. All from customers that took the time to create accounts and write thoughtful reviews.

I’d like to think that Google has SOME obligation to treat me right/fix problems as I’ve dropped over $50K in Adwords spending over my time with them. Not a lot of money to Google, but a significant amount to me, a small business owner. Anyone else I’ve spent that much with has a number I can call, makes things right (or attempts to) when there is an issue, and generally puts in some effort to keep my business. Google, not so much.

Hi everyone. Thanks for your comments. I think a little clarification is necessary here. My comments are in the context of local search and Google Places. I was not sharing our entire marketing and advertising strategy and I would hate for anyone to assume that we use Google Places as our primary lead generator. SEO, email marketing, traditional advertising and (of course) paid search and Facebook advertising are mainstays of our marketing and advertising activities. From this perspective, we have always been diversified and I personally manage all of this. We do not outsource these activities. I’m of the opinion that it’s important for every small business owner to be able closely manage two things: 1. The financial books of the business. 2. All marketing and advertising activities, especially internet activities.

Yes, Google Places is free. Or is it? Our annual advertising budget for Google alone (primarily Adwords) is in the thousands of dollars, but we pay extremely close attention to where our traffic is coming from (ads vs organic etc…) and we are always adjusting things accordingly. Everything in local search is intertwined. Our Adwords advertisements are (were) tied to a useful Google Places profile (via extensions) to add credibility to our ads. I will admit that we are second guessing some of our Google ad budget now that our extensions are useless, but Google will always receive a share of our advertising spending. From your comments it seems many of you want to dismiss this misery because Google Places is a free service. That’s fine. At least we are having this conversation in public so that other business owners can learn from what has transpired. Hopefully other business owners can come up with a local search and review strategy that can help them avoid the painful sting of our Google Places experience. Personally I wish Google Places were a paid service so that we could then demand some level of accountability.

Now, back to my original point. From a local business credibility standpoint we did make a mistake by sending all customers (almost exclusively) to our Google Places profile. Why was it a mistake? Because the profile got dumped/lost/deleted/un-indexed/left behind. Whatever you want to call it, the profile is no longer there and none of the reviews are there either. To Jim and “old telco guy”: are you advocating that we embrace the second (empty) profile and start all over again? There is an old saying, “fool me once, shame on you…” In the context of local search on Google, the baby and the bathwater have already been thrown out by Google.

I take full responsibility for our lack of local search diversification as it pertains to reviews. I should have known better. I should have know that a free service would not treasure my customer feedback the same way that we do. And what about our customers? Yes, we lost our reviews, but think of those customers who’s time was wasted. They put significant thought and detail into communicating their experiences with our business and they also felt that Google was going to live up to an assumed obligation to store that review.

What I did was the equivalent of writing a 56 page term paper while never saving my work. When the power went out, I lost everything. Yes, I am frustrated and angry, but I should have protected myself. Most of all I am afraid to trust Google with this priceless data (customer reviews), but I disagree with those that think a strategy of diversification is a dead end.

Since we have confirmation that this is the result of a Google bug and there is no acceptable use violation, I’m not sure “Tough Love” is a fair term to use. “Tough Luck” is probably more appropriate and we certainly don’t deserve a comparison to business that change their name to show up first in a phonebook. We play by the rules. We read the acceptable use policy front to back and forward again. Then we read it again 20 more times once the profile starting blinking on and off.

One of the greatest things about small startups is that we can be nimble and flexible. If something fails, work around it or go a different direction, but don’t ever make the same mistake twice. Sure, Google currently has a monopoly on search, but other players like Apple and Facebook are sneaking up quickly to at least capture more of local search on the device side of things. I want take this setback and turn it into something positive. Sure, we will have little luck getting a CSR to call us back from Facebook, but Facebook has NEVER lost any of our data and when there is a major change (such as eliminating the review app or re-structuing to Timeline) they at least gave us 30 days notice of that change so we could plan for it.

I continue to hold out hope that our original Google Places profile will come back online and we can re-address local search review strategies again at that time. The following has been our latest strategy for the last 4 weeks. It’s seems to be working out well. We already know we didn’t need 56 5-star reviews with google places. That’s the equivalent of investing your entire retirement portfolio into one equity (say GOOG). It’s a smart strategy when the stock is going up, but bad when it’s time to retire and the stock takes a nose dive. 15 or 20 reviews would have been more than adequate since we started to see the same type of customer comments repeated. We should have only sent about 20% of our customers to Google Places. Going forward, we are in a tough spot because any customers we send to the new (empty shell) Google Places profile will have their reviews associate with the new profile. I’m tempted to delete the profile entirely so this won’t happen. It would be bad if the old profile came online because then we would get flagged as having 2 profiles at the same address/number. More though needs to go into this.

Facebook 30%:
As noted before, we have been sending customers to Facebook to share their YardRents experience on our Facebook page. The upshot, more customers have been sharing reviews since they don’t have to work so hard to share a few sentences of their thoughts. Additionally, all of their friends can see their activity, look in on what’s happening and anybody can share/re-post. We have been getting a lot of new interest as a result of this. The downside, while we have a great volume of reviews, the average length of the review has diminished. Not a big deal though. For Facebook, customer “chatter” is most important and it seems to be working. We have coded other tools for Facebook (apps) to connect with users and capture permissions to actually post back on their wall. That’s another story:)

Angie’s List 10%:
Some customers don’t have a Facebook account, but will have an Angie’s List account so we will send them to Angie’s List. The upside, we have top placement in several Angie’s List categories for the Portland area. The downside, lots of sales calls from Angie’s List and none of those reviews will get indexed on the internet by the search engines. If you want to and can operate within the Angie’s List sub domain of the internet then it’s a great strategy. We are one foot in, one foot out. Every Angie’s List review is one less review that will help SEO.

Yelp 30%:
Since we are a service based business, we have a hard time with Yelp. Yes, we will probably have to pay them something in the near term to get the most out of their service, but again, a little leverage would be nice. The downside, Yelp also has a hard time with our reviews, probably because they are so good:) Nearly 50% of our reviews have been quarantined by the Yelp review Algorithm. Similar to Google, a lot of our reviews are from customer that created a new account simply to post a single review. I’m guessing that has a lot to do with it. At least the reviews are not getting lost entirely. The upside, when Apple comes out with Apple Maps, the rumor is that it’s going to pull it’s places date from Yelp and Facebook and a few other local directories. Again, just a rumor, but I want to get ahead of that.

Bing, Yahoo, Merchant Circle, Citisearch, etc: 10%
Not much more to be said here. Citisearch is paid also, but those reviews get indexed by the search engines and I think Google Places still accepts them as legitimate reviews that it will associate with your Google Places profile. The nice thing is that when Google Places drops your profile, you will still have reviews in place at Citisearch.

Obviously all of this is fluid and should be re-addressed from month to month, but I think it’s a great allocation of target locations where we should be sending customers to do reviews.

Bottom line, please don’t think any of our planning is a result of a knee jerk reaction. Rather it’s the implementation of a review strategy that has been devised over the course of many months.

@mike Success!

there is thousands of business owner like dan going through same thing. Last week Google suspended millions of listings for silly reasons, policy violation, didn’t hide the address. blah blah reason. Dan’s story should be published on mainstream media. Someone please pass this URL to new york times and wall street journal.

@Dan: That was an interesting, engaging, thoughtful, and interesting response. And above all it was informative. As an owner of smb’s I frankly never want to publish any of my hard numbers. I simply don’t want competitors to get a feel for it. I love it when I see any kind of hard numbers from any competitor in any form or format. (ha ha….I search for them!!!!). Always looking for insights.

I assume your percentages have to do with spreading reviews. Somewhat less telling than harder numbers…but still insights. Helpful for me. Possibly more helpful for your competitors.

I do agree though that spreading reviews is a wise policy. I too have learned the hard way.

@Mike: Yes I agree a good email list is helpful. But it is far more involved than just an email list.

I find the email vendors to be very helpful. Costs are reasonable. The tools are effective for creating artistic emails. There are some fairly helpful metrics.

But the real skill is implementation. Implementation is too broad a term.

You have to try a variety of email type messages. You have to experiment a lot to come up with emails that work better than others.

One little interesting fact we have discovered in a general sense: it goes beyond email.

A message type that works in one medium might just strike out in a different medium. For instance a message that works well on the phone might strike out in email or sms…..and a message that works in sms or email might be useless over the phone.

Its about implementation…and in our book that means study study study, experiment-measure, experiment–measure.

but…yeah email is a mechanism to diversify away from google’s monopoly on search.

I have a client who decided about two years ago to update his Places profile and he has been on a roller coaster ride with Google ever since. He recently suffered the same problem as many others and his listing has vanished from search, even though it’s still active on his dashboard. Competitors who have done nothing – few reviews, unclaimed listing and so forth – appear to be unaffected.

The thing is, he’s always worked hard at being in compliance. He’s a very straight forward guy and tries to do everything right.

He believes that if he had done nothing and just left his listing alone, he wouldn’t be having so many problems. I don’t know if that’s true, but it is so ironic to me that it seems those who are trying use Google products, paid or free, tend to be the ones getting penalized.

I bet all the “tough loves” out there didn’t take the same financial hit that some of us did, especially those of us with seasonal businesses. Google makes money off of us one way or another, we are entitled and they are obligated. But it’s going to take more than a rock and slingshot to drop this giant a few notches so that diversification becomes a lemon worth squeezing. I hope some savvy law firm will someday make this nightmare go away.
But enough business man woes what about our customers who depend on these reviews from their neighbors to lead them to just the right company, whom for the first time in history have a tool that will promote good honest businesses and drive the crooks out of business with no money involved to taint the outcome, a tool that picks up where the BBB left off before they became in my opinion just another PAID advertising Co. Google is as obligated to their readers as they are to us.
I’m sure that most of us would gladly pay to get our reviews back considering what it takes to impress a customer to the point of going on line, registering with Google and posting a favorable review. An unhappy customer will gladly take a day off work to post a bad review.
This is actually more than a tool it is a concept free of subliminal manipulation as with TV etc. and the fact that it’s free info. makes it the way of the Web. Imagine this concept creeping into our way of voting for people who can freely represent the people. Good people and good business practices what a concept.

To summarize my problem as best as possible. For a reason that google could never explain, my google account had a hold that prevented me to buy apps through credit/debit cards and also did not allow me to redeem gift cards.

It all started on a Wednesday where I made my first call. In that call they told me that they had to pass the case to another department and the process to solve it would take about 24 hours when they would send me an email indicating the solution. 24 hours later I call again since I had not heard from them. At this time I was told the same thing as the first time. I told them that my impatient to resolve the case was to buy some apps that were special for thanksgiving dates, but they tried to reassure me by saying that these specials usually lasted throughout the Christmas season. Again they told me to wait 24 hours where they were supposed to contact me with the solution. 24 hours later they did not answer. I go back and I call, on this occasion I was told “Wait always has its rewards” to fall in love with they… This time I was told to wait 12 hours for the final answer. 12 hours later I call again, this time the customer service told me sharply “anyone who calls every day will not expedite or solve the problem” and to top this he told me to wait 3 days for the solution. LOL, I laugh because to summarize, I had to create another account to redeem the gift card but it was to late, the apps had gone up in price. Ironically, within 2 days of doing this I get an email from google saying that they had already solved the problem of my account … 2 WEEKS AND HALF to solve this. THAT’S WHY APPLE IS APPLE …