Google updated its Maps policy regarding reviews. While this may not be much of a story in itself, Google also took the opportunity to remove all Yelp reviews from Places, after the two companies had a bit of a disagreement over the matter.
Google says that both positive and negative reviews are encouraged and that users should really just write whatever they care about in them.
That said, the reviews have to comply with the policies and those that don't can be removed, regardless if they are positive or negative. Google is also providing some "best practices" for writing reviews.
Google Places aims to be a central place for useful info about a place, be it a business, a restaurant, a landmark and so on. Obviously, a useful resource are reviews, be them from around the web or posted on the site directly.
And since Yelp already has a vast database of reviews on many places in the US, Google pulled data from the site to populate Place pages. But it did so without Yelp's approval and, while Google could insist that it's just an aggregator and no harm was done, Yelp didn't like it and the fact that Google was moving in more and more into its business didn't help.
Now, all Yelp reviews have been pulled from the Google Places and there is no indication on when or whether they will be available again.
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Regarding the presentation of Yelp review snippets, neither of us was happy with the data as it appeared, so we reclassified results from Yelp while we reviewed our options," Google said in a
statement.
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This means that, for the time being, Yelp pages may not appear as review snippets in Place page results, though relevant results from Yelp will continue appear in the 'more about this place' section, which shows pages about a given location. We are working with Yelp to more intelligently crawl and present results from their site,” it added.
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