One of my web design client's Google business center listing is doing something strange I haven't seen before. In the first section, where you enter your business information (Categories, Hours, Transit, Desc., etc) two short half line customer reviews have snuck into the listing. This is above the Details tab, in the section reserved for the business owner. They are short five to seven words, two fit on one line, and each indicate which review site they came from. I've checked out a bunch of other listings, and can't find another listing that has reviews at the top like this. There is a review section down the page, where these usually show up. One of them is not a great review, and in the reviews section that would be one thing - it happens. But to have one right at the top like this... well it looks pretty brutal. Has anybody else seen this? Is Google starting to move reviews up to the top of the listings?
This is a fairly new feature and that section only shows reviews from certain sites. You aren't seeing that section on other Google Local listings you check because they either don't have any reviews on those specific sites, or Google has not found them yet. I've seen them on quite a few listings though and if they are good reviews, it's a good thing. You may be able to find some help in the Google maps forum, but my guess is the only way to get rid of them is to try to get them removed from the source, which may be hard. Hope this helps and best of luck!
Thank you very much for your help. I really hope Google doesn't get into the "buy $3000 worth of Adwords and we'll make it go away" market.
Yeah, google local and maps are trying out some new stuff that is not working 100% correctly yet. It tries to pull data from different sources and combine them. They could have used the company name, address, or something of that nature and the comment source had the same data so google thought it was the same.
Nope they are getting into the 'pay $25 and get a "tag" listing' market. Once tags roll out to more cities we're going to see something pretty interesting take place. The tags give you extra impact, but don't affect rankings. So I see all these companies buying tags and then needing more help from Local SEO companies to get high enough placement that anyone can even see their "tag"