Google Maps & Local Business Reviews: Caution!

If you are thinking about generating a lot of reviews for your business on Google Maps’ write a review feature, I recommend you read this post about a business who lost all of their reviews on Google Maps.  As Miriam Ellis of SolasWebDesign tells it, Canoe Sport in Houston, TX asked their customers to review their business on Google Maps and got over 30 reviews.  Unfortunately it seems like getting too many reviews too fast may have set off a SPAM filter at Google and all of the reviews disappeared.

While it’s hard to know for sure what happened – could just be a bug – if you’re planning on generating reviews for your business on Google Maps, I’d recommend rolling them out slowly, similar to what you do when you develop inbound links, so that it looks natural.

My theory is that the GMaps team set the SPAM sensitivity very high when they rolled out the reviews feature as in the early days it was likely to be gamed by everyone on the planet.  Of course it could be just some flaky code.  One never knows do one?