Since early August with the roll out of Critic Reviews and Top 10 Lists and with the recent rollout of Reviews from the web and a significant review snippet display upgrade, Google has been on a rich snippet tear. Here are some my thoughts, big and small, about these changes.

Do you see these changes as anti-competitive? Do you see them as helping your business? I would love to hear from you.

Rich Snippets and Aggregate Review Counts are significantly more prominent in the search results with upgrades to both the Knowledge Panel and the review snippet display.

Not only has Google increased review rich snippet prominence in the mobile display but has also included pricing information.

This new review snippet display has been changed for other entities as well. You can see in this Recipe snippet that the third column was also used to include even more information. It is interesting to speculate how that might be used for Local. (H/T to Aaron Weiche.)

Google has looked far and wide for additional review content and has included a lot of content from sites Zomato and FourSquare as well as others providing site reviews.

It would appear that sites like FourSquare and Zomato became more visible in brand searches as well.

As noted by Joy Hawkins having your own review system like GetFiveStars seems to offer SERP display benefits particularly for multi location businesses.  (I am a principal in GetFiveStars.)

There is, as always, a ranking element in the order that the aggregate data shows in the Knowledge Panel. This, at first glance, seems to mirror the organic order of the review sites with snippets on the brand search. There also seems to be a correlation with total review count. Which also correlates somewhat to organic positioning… ooh my head is spinning.

This upgrade, following closely on the heels of the prominent Critic Review display, was accompanied by another new update to the Guidelines for critic reviews and review snippets.

These guidelines make it totally obvious that critic reviews must be human curated. While no mention was made whether Top 10 lists also need to be so curated one assumes that might be the case. (Although this is not at all clear.)

With the rollout of Critic review displays, it is likely that these sorts of reviews have taken on a more important ranking impact than UGC reviews. Google in articulating the newest guidelines seems to be encouraging the development of this sort of content for businesses other than restaurants.

Yelp has come and gone from the KP display of aggregate reviews while TripAdvisor has not been seen even though both rank highly and frequently on brand searches. Yelp, for those of you new to Local, has had a long standing and contentious relationship vis a vis Google’s use of their review content that precedes their anti-trust testimony.

Google has searched far and wide for review content to include in this upgrade. I would speculate that Yelp and TripAdvisor apparently chose not to participate in the Knowledge Panel display. I would posit that Google, not having as much ability to display these two leader’s aggregate review content, perhaps chose to dilute Yelp’s and TA’s impact by prominently showing all of the other review content around the internet?

Interesting question that we can only speculate about.  I am sure that we will more on the topic from Yelp and Google.

Your thoughts?