Case study explains impact of Google reviews on local ranking
Search Engine Marketing columnist Joy Hawkins has shared a case study explaining the impact of Google reviews on local ranking.
Hawkins says, “In May of this year, many small businesses lost a number of Google reviews. A month later, Google provided my colleague Mike Blumenthal a statement that confirmed the reviews were not coming back:
We do not allow anonymous reviews today and we’ve removed legacy anonymous reviews.
The reviews removed were old reviews from anonymous profiles that didn’t have a profile attached to them. Since they didn’t have profiles attached, it would also take you to a blank page when you tried to click the username, which is not the greatest user experience.
How many reviews were removed?
BrightLocal looked at nearly 2 million Google reviews for over 40,000 businesses and found that 3 percent (just over 50,000 in their sample) were removed as a result of this.
I wondered if this would be a good opportunity to figure out if the number of reviews on a listing impacts ranking. I looked through dozens of examples comparing the search results before this update to what they were after. I wanted to find cases where several ranking businesses lost reviews to see what the impact was“.
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