Over the past few days its become apparent that Google Places has stopped using 3rd party review websites as a factor in the rankings of Google Places listings. This is a pretty big kick in the teeth for me personally as I’ve spent the last eternity trying to develop links for the keyword ‘hairdressers london’ for one of our clients. It is true that the Places page is still showing 3rd party reviews( for now) only this number is no longer tied to the overall review count. Instead Google Places is showing their internal review metrics.
Several of our clients use business cards as a way of suggesting that clients visit these key websites to leave reviews. But with the Google Places URL being a massive Querystring, putting this on the back of a card isn’t adviseable.
What you can do is use a URL shortening service like bit.ly to set up a custom short website address that will take users to your places page. instead of google.com/?foo=12345&moo=67890&bar=abcdef you can have bit.ly/brandname.
That is a bit annoying – I had also been plugging away putting i reviews for businesses to get them counted for the google places review count … I’m sure it will still be useful on some level for getting google to take a business and website taken seriously though- even if its weighting is reduced.