Google Place Pages Get a Detailed Ranking System

Google has a special interest in one of its newest products, Place Pages, which was recently introduced to Google Earth, as it merges some of the fastest growing markets at the moment. On the one hand, it caters to small and local businesses which don't traditionally advertise online but which could represent a huge, untapped market for Google. On the other hand, it incorporates some of the most useful aspects of location-based services. Finally, its sheer scope makes it a very important product even if it manages to achieve a small part of what it set out to do, that is to create a web page for every place on earth. Now Google is introducing a new feature which goes head-to-head with several, rather popular, web site categories like restaurant reviews.

“Today, we launched a new feature to rank and show distinguishing aspects for businesses on their Place Pages. By taking a look at a Place Page, you can quickly get a better sense of what people are saying about a business and view relevant snippets about each specific aspect (say, the price, the service, or the infamous deep dish pizza) from all over the web,” Andrew McCarthy and Diego Nogueira from Google's Local Search team wrote.

The new feature shows up just below the main sections, like overview and the photos. It gives an easy-to-read measurement of what people are saying about the place complete with a colored bar which turns from green to red. The ranking criteria are generated automatically from the number of mentions online and they can be pretty accurate even for smaller venues. It enables users to find out not only general opinions about the atmosphere or the staff, but also details about the actual services or products.

“We look for pages that talk about particular places and analyze content on those pages that express a sentiment (i.e., a positive or negative comment) about that place. We display snippets of the sentiment to help you discover the best sources of information about the specific topic of interest,” the two explain how Google comes up with the ranking keywords.