Greetings from inside the SEOigloo!
Mike Blumenthal is really keeping on top of this stuff! As he reports, the missing Yelp, City Search and Insiderpages reviews have reappeared in Google Maps. How did Google lose these? How did they find them again? I suspect that will remain a mystery!
This came as very silly timing for me, as yesterday I sent an article to Jen and Stoney for publication on Search Engine Guide that was speculating on Google’s seemingly-terminated relationships with City Search, Insiderpages and Yelp. I suppose it’s the nature of the Search business that what is breaking news today may be completely inaccurate tomorrow. I’m grateful to Mike for letting me know about this sudden change before my article went to print. Whew!
The great takeaway from Mike’s post is this. If you are in Google Maps and you want to see reviews from a specific entity, you can do a search like this:
restaurant site:dine.com sonoma ca
and it will show you exaclty that data – in this case, reviews from dine.com for restaurants in Sonoma, CA. Neat, huh? I can’t seem to get it to work for just Google’s reviews at the moment. I’ll keep fiddling with my wording.
Anyhow, we’re in different shape today than we were yesterday. If there ever was a coolness between Google and these partners, it’s all settled now, and if it was really just a bug in the system, it’s fixed!