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Google Maps has become an extremely popular local search destination. Thus, making sure your Google Maps reviews are in order is an important part of your overall SEO and SEM routine.
A recent report at Google Maps Help forums has a confirmed bug where Google is pulling the wrong star values from third party review sites. In one case, Google is counting 4 out of 5 stars as 1 out of 5 stars - yes, that can be devastating.
Here is an example:
Look at this Google Places page review:
Google Maps shows one star, but when you click through and look at that specific review, it shows up as four stars:
Google's Joel Headley confirmed the bug and said "We're working on a fix and hope to get it resolved soon. It will likely be a multiple weeks before it's resolved."
Oh, if you are bored, feel free to drop my company a positive review. :)
Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.
Comments:
Melissa Fach
07/14/2010 06:08 pm
I have been seeing this a lot lately and wrongly assumed it was user error.
Jim Ryan
07/14/2010 11:39 pm
This issue can be resolved and will be. More disconcerting is the bigger picture and the worthless state of customer reviews. It doesn't take an IQ of more than 70 to see the far majority of all reviews are fictitious originating from the business itself or malicious originating from a competitor or over zealot nutcase. Does anyone seriously think this will be resolved by the likes of Google, Kudzu, Yahoo local, Bing or IYP?
Smorf
07/17/2010 03:19 am
We are seeing this trend often in jewoogle places. 1. Your jewoogle places listing disappears from your jewoogle account, this cannot happen without jewoogle employees manually doing this. 2. You submit a second listing, now you have 2 listings 3. Your listing disappears from relevant categories.