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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google & Reviews Snippets – If It Can Go Wrong It Will Go Very Wrong Category

Update 3/5: Dan notes the response he received from support: “We attempted to retain the review itself and could not do so as a “snippet”, though it still stands as a wonderful review for your business. We removed the confusing snippet from your account.”

Update 2:27 PM (PST) 2/27: Googler Jade Wang just posted this on Dan’s original post: We are working to correct or remove this snippet. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Last  year Google added review snippets that represent general sentiment to the Knowledge Panel. These snippets are determined by algo and are intended to represent the public’s attitude about a business . Like all Google algos sooner or later they screw up and in inimitable fashion Google is unwilling or unable to fix it.

Dan Petrovic of DejanSEO in Australia reported a case on G+ yesterday where a positive review of his business was mangled into a negative snippet.

review

I, in my best Boy Scout behavior, suggested that he might want to contact the group that dealt with business snippets and see if they would take it down.

Here is Dan’s reply from Sylvia B. :

Thanks for contacting Google Places for Business support regarding the descriptive terms associated with your business on the local Google+ page for your business. At this time, we do not remove terms for reasons such as being unclear or negative. These terms are a piece of our search results and we try to avoid editing or creating bias in what we show.”

If Google’s head were any further up their arse than this they could still pull it out 12″ and have another 12″ to go.