{"id":21529,"date":"2018-05-24T12:45:10","date_gmt":"2018-05-24T16:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=21529"},"modified":"2018-05-29T10:45:40","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T14:45:40","slug":"google-stops-counting-anonymous-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/24\/google-stops-counting-anonymous-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Stops Counting Anonymous Reviews?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Update<\/strong>: Over the weekend many of these “A Google User Reviews” were removed from the corpus as well as the count. <\/p>\n

I just got this email from my favorite pet client, Barbara Oliver.<\/p>\n

She watches her reviews like a hawk and is very protective of them:<\/p>\n

I noticed today that I have 139 google reviews and up until now, I had 172. Do they just delete older ones? You know how I get as I work so hard to earn them \u2026\u2026
\nBarbara<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thanks to a tip<\/a> from Martin Briggs, of the thesearchroom.com<\/a>\u00a0on Twitter, I was able to confirm that Google didn’t throw them away, they are just no longer counting anonymous reviews from “A Google User” in the total shown in the Knowledge Panel.<\/p>\n

Whether this fortells some other action vis a vis anonymous reviews is not clear. But for now, many businesses will see an immediate drop in their review count. It will be more obvious to those that started the review process before the G+ era and have a lot of reviews from non-identified users.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-plus"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t