Yelp is a popular local reviews website. There are reviews covering businesses in nearly 40 states as well as the United Kingdom. Users can review everything from the worst club they have ever visited to the best little restaurant that is so unknown that if you blink, you’d miss it. There are also social networking features available with Yelp, like forums, events, groups, and the ability to add and contact friends.

At one time, Google Places was filled with content from yelp users. Years ago, Google actually paid Yelp to use the content to beef up the Places pages. However, the two companies had a falling out after Yelp refused to sell out to Google in 2009 and Yelp walked away from the deal. This summer, Google suddenly began to crawl Yelp pages and started using their content once again to beef up the Google Places pages. This unlicensed content was not paid for and permission had not been given by Yelp for Google to use it.

Yelp itself was annoyed that the reviews Google used were pushed to the bottom of the search page. Official partners, such as Zagat, were right at the top. Now Yelp content is considered to be intellectual property and Yelp reviews will not be showing up on Google pages. However, if you scroll down to the very bottom where there are random links related to the place you are searching, you might find Yelp linked to there.

So what does this mean for Yelp? It means that Yelp will get less exposure from Google, which could be a serious problem since Place Pages are getting lots of traffic. It’s very possible that Yelp users are being directed to Yelp through Google, though Yelp does have a steady base of users. Yet with less exposure, it’s likely that less people will go to Yelp. It is vital that Yelp work harder on their social media marketing and their mobile development.

What does this potentially mean for your business? Yelp competitors such as Yahoo Local, Urbanspoon, Citysearch and others will be the ones getting the exposure. This means that your customers have even more ways to find reviews about your business. This makes a bad reputation more likely to follow you around. Thanks to Google’s Place Pages you can now add coupons or discounts to your page and even advertise using tags. With a wider variety of review sites showing your business, you could see an increase in customers.