FSN Reviews are Now Google Maps Citations

[duanermb]

I think everyone knows that we are big supporters of Flower Shop Network and use all of their services. There is often discussion here about the directory and their web sites, and whether or not its worth it to pay to be in the directory.

After taking a bit of a hit on our maps listings and dropping a few spots over the past couple of months, we are now back at the top for several search terms, and actually doing a little better in the organic listings after taking a few hits there over the past couple of months due to some more heated competition from a few gorillas.

Apparently, this is in no small part due to an additional 15 reviews coming from our Flower Shop Network reviews page! (Yesterday)

Firstly, this makes us stand out nicely in the 7 pack without having manipulated the reviews. (Can you believe those are actual customers? )

Second: Google considering FSN reviews to be a citation for the maps is absolutely huge. I believe that, because it is also a business specific source, the weight for organic listings must also be fairly strong.

It appears that you just have to have a directory link to be reviewed.

Don't tell Google, but the great thing about the FSN reviews is that (unlike Google Maps) with our full site controls, we have complete control over which ones get posted and which ones don't.

 

[roysecityfloristand gifts]

Duane I checked out your reviews. Those from FSN don't have the daisy rating flowers beside them, so...I'm wondering how they came to be on your Google search results.

Your saying Google picked them up from FSN, or they were cut and pasted???

I tried to cut and paste my FSN reviews onto Yahoo local and Google but could not.

I did manage to cut and paste reviews from Yahoo local to Google but without the star ratings showing.

I think if we earn good reviews we deserve to have them shown on every directorys results. Yet these various directory results never have all of our reviews on them, so it is up to each of us.

All of us should be "managing" our reviews. Perhaps, Cathy has some information about this to share. Cathy if your reading this, I know you keep an eye on this kind of thing. Can you suggest any thing we all can do to improve our online reviews.
Especially with this new information Duane has uncovered.

Thanks to everyone who teaches us in this regard.

 

[Eric S]

All of us should be "managing" our reviews. Perhaps, Cathy has some information about this to share. Cathy if your reading this, I know you keep an eye on this kind of thing. Can you suggest any thing we all can do to improve our online reviews.
Especially with this new information Duane has uncovered.

Thanks to everyone who teaches us in this regard.

I think cathy needs to paid.

Anyways personally if you have anyway of altering or editing reviews I think that would be big no no and google would probally ding you.

Letting the search engines decide what is relevant is the safe way to things. If anything if your reviews have ways to respond I would take full advantage of that.

But I think copy and pasting reviews to another listing would not be good. It may work temporay but in the long run it could really hurt.

 

[roysecityfloristand gifts]

Eric I totally agree about Cathy, She's a great person and so giving in her information to us all. Cathy called me years ago when FTD was hijacking my search results.

My question to Duane or anyone that knows is how did Duane get those FSN reviews onto Googles results? I'm hoping you techies will explain it. I personally didn't say anything about altering or editing a review. I too think that would be bad.

Thanks!

 

[Eric S]

Eric I totally agree about Cathy, She's a great person and so giving in her information to us all. Cathy called me years ago when FTD was hijacking my search results.

My question to Duane or anyone that knows is how did Duane get those FSN reviews onto Googles results? I'm hoping you techies will explain it. I personally didn't say anything about altering or editing a review. I too think that would be bad.

Thanks!

I know you didn't.

All I'm saying is that if there is a way to tell google to pull those reviews from another source it really wouldn't be up to us. And if it was I think that would mean someone is doing something they shouldn't be doing.

I personally would like to take the 149 reviews that I have on our yahoo store that use to show up. But thats not up to me.

 

[roysecityfloristand gifts]

Hey Eric, you've got it down on those great reviews on your site, and I know you guys deserve every good thing said about you. For those of us without comment pages on our sites, we have to depend on the directory listings for our reviews.

I wonder if FSN can or would or have gotten with Google so that those FSN reviews will/can show up on Google? Obviously someone has done it.

So I guess the question is to Duane...how did you come across this information Duane?

Is it something Google did, and how do we all take advantage of this new thing?

Thanks.

 

[duanermb]

Duane I checked out your reviews. Those from FSN don't have the daisy rating flowers beside them, so...I'm wondering how they came to be on your Google search results.

Your saying Google picked them up from FSN, or they were cut and pasted???

Google seems to have decided that these are Dragonfly Flowers on McPhillips reviews and added them on their own. It shows that Google sees FSN as a major contributor to those types of reviews. i am sure it is in no small part due to some of my local SEO efforts, but I can't say for sure. (i'd like to think so!)

If you look at Cathy's (CHR), many are from CitySearch and other places that Google sees as authorities on reviews.

I tried to cut and paste my FSN reviews onto Yahoo local and Google but could not.

I did manage to cut and paste reviews from Yahoo local to Google but without the star ratings showing.

I think if we earn good reviews we deserve to have them shown on every directorys results. Yet these various directory results never have all of our reviews on them, so it is up to each of us.

You could be right, but I tend to think that the more real your reviews are, the better off you will be in the long run. That's not to say that you can't review your flower shop friends, but I would be careful about copying reviews to several places as it is not in the spirit of reviews. A high level of reviews can be obtained through recipient marketing and requesting those reviews from your customers.

All of us should be "managing" our reviews. Perhaps, Cathy has some information about this to share. Cathy if your reading this, I know you keep an eye on this kind of thing. Can you suggest any thing we all can do to improve our online reviews.
Especially with this new information Duane has uncovered.

Thanks to everyone who teaches us in this regard.

I have also added a link to several places where people can review us at the bottom of our Testimonials page, but I doubt it is doing anything. It is actual happy/unhappy customers that will review you. You just have to keep asking them for it! (FSN automates this)

(Don't want to keep pumping FSN too much, but they have certainly eliminated a great deal of effort for us with regards to sender marketing. I didn't realize just how much they are actually doing for us!)

 

[roysecityfloristand gifts]

Thanks Duane. Yes I understand that Google sees the major players (Yahoo,MSN,etc) and their reviews as reliable, and therefore acceptable for
repeating on Google.

Please, everyone understand, I do not write reviews for myself, nor do I ask others to write fake reviews on me. Perhaps I'm mistakenly reading this presumption into what you guys are saying and I don't want any confusion.

What I said was that pasting real reviews to other sites that have not yet for whatever reason, picked up those real reviews for their own sites, such as what Google is apparently doing now.

The Real Customer Reviews on Yahoo Local, City Search, Merchant Circle, etc. etc. should in all fairness be repeated on Google. It is apparent to me that all of these folks use one anothers reviews anyway, for the most part..

The new and great thing here is that our reviews from FSN will at last be available to those reading reviews from Google. A consumer would have to know to go to FSN look us up and then read testimonials as they are called there. This is a very unlikely senario.

Duane, do you know where we can read more about what Google is doing regarding this development? Thanks for the information.

Duane, I agree that the option on FSN to review a shops performance is a great thing. I really need to work on getting a comments page on my website, like Eric has on his. The easier for the consumer to review you, the better.

 

[roysecityfloristand gifts]

Steve, I see your viewing the thread, Do you know how Google and the FSN Testimonials got together? It's very good news. Thanks.

 

[LJVF]

As Duane already knows, an interesting set of events have occurred with the addition of the FSN reviews. Google will display the average of all reviews based on one to five stars. Yesterday they were counting FSN reviews as zero stars regardless if it was good or bad review. So Google was displaying Duane's shop as a one star shop.

Today, they completely removed Duane's average star rating all together. Below is an example of what Duane's missing average star rating and what a normal one looks like:

Notice how Eric's profile shows an average star rating of 5, but Duane's is completely omitted?

I wonder how this will effect other businesses profiles and if Google plans to eliminate the average star rating all together?

 

[roysecityfloristand gifts]

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Darrel !!!

That is what I've been looking for, the missing information that surrounded this change.

Google does both good and bad things for us. The averaging of review ratings would be unfair, and I certainly hope Google comes to the same conclusion.

I've seen ratings that gave glowing review in "words" yet only gave 4 stars. The words of the reviewer are what readers look at. However, five stars is five stars!

 

[spellham]

Google Citations

Steve, I see your viewing the thread, Do you know how Google and the FSN Testimonials got together? It's very good news. Thanks.

Google really hasn't 'imported' or captured the testimonials in terms of creating duplicate content. They have simply associated the reviews & testimonials page for Duane's shop with his Google Local listing as a citation.

Citations (or 'related sites' if you will) is the key phrase here. Google uses mainly certain authoritative data sources to use as citations because they are trusted, have built reputation and present useful content.

Although I would like to attribute this to some specific change that we've made, but I honestly can't. Google picks and chooses the sources it uses for the LBC citations, so my guess is that they've expanded their data sources used to generate and create these citations and/or modified their algorithm for identifying these relationships.

 

[spellham]

Microformats & Rich Snippets

As Duane already knows, an interesting set of events have occurred with the addition of the FSN reviews. Google will display the average of all reviews based on one to five stars. Yesterday they were counting FSN reviews as zero stars regardless if it was good or bad review. So Google was displaying Duane's shop as a one star shop.

Today, they completely removed Duane's average star rating all together. Below is an example of what Duane's missing average star rating and what a normal one looks like:

Notice how Eric's profile shows an average star rating of 5, but Duane's is completely omitted?

I wonder how this will effect other businesses profiles and if Google plans to eliminate the average star rating all together?

In regard to star ratings, I'm sure that Google has found a wealth of great review sources... but not all of them use the same rating structure (5 stars, 10 stars, 5 hearts, etc...) so I imagine it could be difficult to parse all of the different rating methods apart and represent them accurately.

I specifically remember an article referencing Yelp, maybe CitySearch as well involving what they termed "microformatting" in terms of reviews. The short description was that Google suggested that a specific markup be used to identify user reviews and ratings - that would in turn help them to more accurately identify star ratings and so forth.

I believe that this was specifically announced with the launch of Rich Snippets - link to SEL article from may here.

Knowing Google, the inclusion or exclusion of the star ratings in LBC are one huge A/B test. I imagine that whichever version generates more click-through traffic to the LBC will be the one that they end up using globally.

 

[roysecityfloristand gifts]

Thanks for the information, spellham.

 

[roysecityfloristand gifts]

Thanks for the link on the "rich snippets" incredibly interesting!!!!

Anyone who has built their own site or is interested, read this link in spellhams post.