Third-Party Reviews in Google

| SEO

Third-Party Reviews in Google

Getting honest reviews/testimonials for your business is very important for your online success. People generally don’t trust businesses online and these reviews on trusted websites can really make a difference to your online presence.

Not that you needed another reason to encourage your customers to leave reviews for your business but Google has been testing a new feature within their search engine results that displays third-party review sites within their searches.

Up until now, Google has only shown its own reviews when you search for a location or brand. These reviews are the ones that are left on either Google Maps or Google+.

However, a few cases have been spotted where Google are showing third-party sites like Booking.com displayed underneath Google Business listings.

In these cases Google are still showing their reviews on the search engine results page, however underneath that section is a new heading which says “Reviews from the web”. Here you will see reviews from third-party websites like Booking.com with a link to view more reviews from similar sites.

This means in the future Estate Agents may see reviews from sites like Allagents.co.uk, Yelp, Yell, Facebook and any other third-party website underneath their business name whenever someone searches for their brand or location.

It is crucial that you make sure your online presence is up to scratch and there aren’t any poor reviews that could cause you problems later down the line.

At this time, these third-party reviews are only being seen by people searching for hotels but if the testing is a success Google are likely to roll this out for more types of businesses.

Obviously, this test may come to nothing but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth checking third-party review sites to see how well your online presence is doing.  

Luke Stanley