14 DAY TRIAL // Google is giving Place Pages reviews a little revamp and is also bringing back Yelp reviews. Third-party reviews are now better separated from Google users' reviews and are also branded to make them easier to spot.
"Today, we’re announcing a new design for how reviews are displayed on Place pages. Now, when you look at a Place page for a business, you’ll see a section on the page called 'Reviews from around the web'," Jana Urban from the Google Place Page Team writes.
"This section highlights reviews from a variety of sources, and helps you identify the sites that have high-quality, relevant information about a particular place," she adds.
"In many cases, this newly formatted section also provides a quick summary of what you can expect to see, including the number of reviews from each source and the average star rating that reviewers on that site gave a place," she explains.
The big move is the fact that reviews from dedicated sites, like Yelp, Zagat, Citysearch and so on, now live in a separate section named "Reviews from around the web."
The reviews created by users on Place Pages itself are grouped under "Reviews by Google users."
There are also small icons for the websites where the reviews are coming from. This move makes it easier for user to identify the source of the review and it also gives the original websites some recognition.
This is important because there were some disagreements between Google and Yelp in particular with the unlicensed use of the reviews.
Google and Yelp had a deal a couple of years ago but it was not renewed. In fact, recently, Yelp reviews were removed from Place Pages though neither company would provide an explanation as to why.
In fact, there doesn't seem to be an agreement even now as Yelp says that talks are ongoing.