{"id":6834,"date":"2010-06-14T14:30:40","date_gmt":"2010-06-14T18:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=6834"},"modified":"2010-06-14T22:00:53","modified_gmt":"2010-06-15T02:00:53","slug":"yelp-reviews-back-in-google-maps-as-their-com-growth-stops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/14\/yelp-reviews-back-in-google-maps-as-their-com-growth-stops\/","title":{"rendered":"Yelp Reviews Back in Google Maps as their .COM Growth Stops"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yelp’s relationship with Google Maps has been off and on again. Their reviews have disappeared<\/a> and reappeared on Google Maps over the past 3 years as Google’s and Yelp’s relationship has waxed and waned. But the relationship now seems to be on once again. About 10 days ago Yelp’s reviews again started showing up on Places Pages<\/a>. I would posit that this reinclusion reflects Yelp’s need to buttress and improve their traffic short haul while they implement the changes necessary to fend off<\/a> the location based startups. <\/p>\n

Yelp has been the hot local site from 2007 through last year and their Compete.com numbers reflected their meteoric growth on the desktop. But their .com growth in unique visitors and page views started to decline<\/a> last August and has continued downward throughout this year. At the end of April, Compete shows their unique visitors to be in the 25 million range, down from the 30 million last August. <\/p>\n

Some of the slowdown on the desktop has been taken up with growth in mobile and particularly the iPhone. Yelp notes<\/a> that they had 1.4 million visitors over the past 30 days via their iPhone app. That amounts to ~3% of their total visitors and does not make up for the almost 20% decline in their .com usage. <\/p>\n

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The numbers and their decision to allow Google to include their reviews suggest that Yelp’s transition to a general purpose review site has not taken off as they had planned. Long haul, Yelp does need to keep their eye on the many location based competitors. That being said, it seems even more important that they keep their eye, short term, on their main competitor in the review space, Google Maps. It appears to me that their need for growth and traffic has won out over their obvious points of contention with Google. <\/p>\n

From a practical viewpoint, it demonstrates why any SMB needs to continue to gather reviews from a wide range of sources<\/a> as the vagaries of these corporate relationships change, you don’t want to be caught in the crossfire. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yelp’s relationship with Google Maps has been off and on again. Their reviews have disappeared and reappeared on Google Maps over the past 3 years as Google’s and Yelp’s relationship has waxed and waned. But the relationship now seems to be on once again. About 10 days ago Yelp’s reviews again started showing up on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,1,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-maps-google-local","category-local-mobil","category-uncategorized","category-reviews"],"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