Google Place Pages List Testimonials From Your Site

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Google announced last month that it’s now using Rich Snippets for local searches. Webmasters with pages that in some way pertain to real world places, can utilize these to reference those places and optimize for local search results.

Google Place Pages contain links to reviews for businesses and according to the Rich Snippets for Local Search FAQ, Google will treat testimonials the same as business reviews on the Place Page.

This naturally raises questions about these testimonials and the potential for people to put up fake testimonials in an effort to make their businesses look better.

Since testimonials will be treated the same as reviews, they’ll also contribute to the total number of reviews for a business. This could also have major impact on the rank, sentiment analysis, and tone of the reviews.

This addition of testimonials to the Google’s Place Plages is significant as many people will see them as they simply search for local business listings, and act as a very persuasive tool.

Luicer says:

February 22, 2012 at 6:21 am

Great. It is good to hear that Google is using Rich Snippets for local searches hoping that this won’t raise up the the potentiality for people to put up fake testimonials as one way of making their business smarter! Thanks for coming up with this information and it sounds of much use to me. Looking forward for more information. Credibly awesome share.

laser says:

October 9, 2011 at 1:16 am

This makes me think about how important location is for searching online. Not only physical location, but web visibility, so that customers can easily engage via the web.

David says:

October 19, 2010 at 11:30 am

I think there is potential to rort the system as you said with fake testimonials etc.These testimonials being counted as business reviews l can see it getting out of hand.