Earlier this year, I discovered that Google local results didn’t always return listings with reviews. We’re all familiar with the Google local listings and we look to them for reviews, but when I was searching for a local business, I realized that the listings didn’t have reviews with them. So you could still find information like the website.
You could still find directions. There may have even been an order button if it was a restaurant. But you didn’t have the reviews. What’s happening is that if you make a broad generic search, then you will get listings with reviews. But if you search for a specific business, then you will not get reviews.
And this is the current state, and this is a bad change. It really wastes a lot of time because now you have to make a broad search to find reviews about a specific business. And we all know that the different locations of a business vary. Some locations will have excellent reviews and other locations will have horrible reviews.
But you can’t find that by searching the specific business name directly. So let me give you an example. I live in the Dallas Fort Worth area, commonly referred to as DFW. And if you search for public storage, DFW, you will come across listings for the various public storage locations, but you will not get reviews for those listings.
So what you would have to do. Would be to search for storage DFW, or maybe to target in on a specific city, you would have to search for public store or storage, Dallas or storage, Plano, etc. So that’s what needs to happen. You have to search for a broad category to get the reviews. This is a horrible change.
It just wastes a lot of time. There’s no reason that the reviews for specific business listings shouldn’t be there just even if it’s the search is just for the specific business because those different locations have different reviews. One other note. When I was looking up I was researching this this episode to see if there was other conversation about it.
Google is confusing the search and it’s conflating business owners looking for reviews that are missing to what I think many people are searching for is not being able to refine reviews in Google local results. So even if you search for this topic, it can be difficult to find out what’s going on because Google is looking at the marketing side and the business owner side and I think something else altogether.
It may, there may be some overlap, but it’s really talking to, it’s really speaking to local business owners that are asking about where their reviews have, have gone and not the fact that Google has repulled reviews All together from specific local searches. So this is what’s happening. It is a bad update by Google.
I, I don’t, I don’t know why they would have done it. It may, it may have something to do with just Google local listings, not wanting reviews to come up. I don’t know, but this is a bad change. It wastes a lot of time and they should take it back to the way it was.