Can Getting a Lot of Google or Yelp Reviews at Once Hurt Your Plastic Surgery Clinic?

“Does collecting a lot of reviews all at once affect your plastic surgery clinic in a negative way? Would it be better to space those out?”

Okay so, when it comes to getting a lot of reviews, Google doesn't really care. Here is what you have to be careful with if you use Google. You don't necessarily want a lot of reviews coming from the same IP address. So, like, you don't want them all to be from your office Wi-Fi and leave in reviews. You want to make sure they are unique.

On the other hand, Google doesn't really have a problem with you asking for reviews. We have clients that have gotten like 20-25 reviews. Actually, I have a client that got 47 reviews in like a two-week period. That was like five years ago and to this day, they still say they get a ton of phone calls just because they got so many reviews. 

So, with Google I don't think it's a big deal. Now, Yelp will absolutely filter every single review that you have if you get a bunch. Why? Because Yelp does not want you to be asking people for reviews.

What is going to happen is, if you have a Yelp account that has been around for three years and it never got a review or maybe got one review or two reviews over a 3-year period, then all of a sudden you get 15 reviews in a two-week period, Yelp knows something unnatural is happening there. They will think that you are probably asking for reviews. Basically, with them you definitely need to space it out.

What I always tell my plastic surgery clients is that, “if you have patients that leave reviews for other places on Yelp frequently, or if you have some friends on Yelp and if they have an established account, those are the types of patients that you want to ask specifically to leave you a Yelp review.” And you only want to do it maybe once every 6 to 8 weeks. Just because of the fact that it is not cool when you get these reviews and then you get them filtered out.

I was talking to a colleague one day and he told me about his client. According to him, this client never does anything. He would give them specific instructions and they would never do it. So, he told them one day to get some Yelp reviews. He did not expect them to ever get a single Yelp review but in the next 3 days, they got 12 Yelp reviews. All of which were promptly filtered. My colleague did not even think they would do it, so he did not even mention the fact, “Hey, let’s spread this out over the next year or so.” They were pretty pissed so, lesson was learned. Do not get that many Yelp reviews in a short period of time.

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