What Happens in Yelp, Stays in... Google?

It finally happens.

You “google yourself” (or your business name) and come across something disturbing. Among the various links in the search engine results you see an image next to your business name showing one out of five stars.

It’s a one star rating… right next to your name… for the whole world to see.

Your heart starts racing as you click through the link to the review website (could be Yelp, Google, TaxBuzz.com or other similar). You read review in shock and horror. Questions race through your mind:  “This must be a mistake, right? Who did this? Why did I deserve only one star? How do I get this removed? Why me?”

Within a few minutes, you quickly go through various stages of disbelief, confusion, anger and perhaps a few sleepless nights.

What to do if this happens to you?

First, don’t panic. Take a deep breath.  Millions (if not billions) of reviews are placed for products, businesses, practices and professionals every day.  Like it or not, we have entered the era of the “reputation economy” (read more here, here or read this book). Your customers and clients value online reviews, they trust them and they are going to leave them for you and many other businesses and practices.

Take comfort knowing you are not at all alone. At some point in your career or in the life of your practice or business, you are going to get reviews on multiple web sites. It’s not a matter of “if” but “when” and “what kind” of reviews you will get. If you are in practice or business long enough and serve enough clients or customers, it is only a matter of time before you get a customer that, despite all your best efforts, you cannot please… or a competitor or someone else who is “out to get you” … or just someone random who mistakes you or your business for someone else.  Face the reality: You are going to get reviewed online. Unfortunately, we have clients who are so afraid to get “bad” reviews, that they stick their heads in the sand hoping they will never get any reviews.  Online reviews and review sites are not some kind of fad that will eventually fade away -- they are here to stay.

Second, there are some things you can do quickly to improve or even rectify your situation. Read the review carefully, but try not to take it personally. However painful the review may be to read, see if you can determine if it is a customer or client who you recognize. In most situations, threatening the review website or the reviewer with a lawsuit or other action may not help your cause – going nuclear on the reviewer or review site also could make things much worse.

To respond, or not to respond?

Every case is different and you may want to consult a trusted adviser or colleague (or feel free to contact me for some thoughts). If the negative review is your first review, you may want to seek out the customer or client to try to work things out. Often, the best outcome could be to have a nice interaction with the client, clear up any misunderstandings and see if he/she would consider revising or removing the review.

If you have lots of positive reviews, you may not need to respond to a negative one.  For example, when one of our accounting clients got a negative review, she already had dozens of fantastic five-star reviews.  So, she was fine with the negative review because it was about her pricing being “too high” for complicated tax returns.  She felt it was actually a good thing as this review might actually help to set expectations and discourage “bargain hunters” from using her services.

If you want to contact the reviewer, some review websites may allow you to send the reviewer a private, direct message. Or you might already have his/her phone number or email address. Use these connection points very carefully, however. You should politely attempt to contact the reviewer privately first. If that fails, you may want to consider posting a public reply to the review.

If you reach out to the reviewer or reply to the review publicly, stay calm, cool and collected. Be careful not to seem overly defensive or go on the attack. Thank the reviewer for his feedback and, if it seems warranted, apologize for how he feels: “I am sorry that you were not 100% satisfied with your experience with us.”  Stress that feedback is important to your business and that you value input from your clients.

If there are any errors in fact in the review, it may make sense to carefully correct the errors or set the record straight in your reply. However, again, use caution when doing so. For attorneys, doctors, accountants, etc., even more caution and restraint may be necessary as to not disclose any confidential information about the client and/or his situation (consult an attorney or the appropriate ethics board of your state if you have questions about how to handle this).

In some situations, the client may have second thoughts. Perhaps the review was written in haste and/or out of frustration. Maybe there was a miscommunication that can be cleared up upon speaking with you. Or he might consider revising the review, making corrections and/or upping your rating.

Whatever the reason, the best outcome is often for the reviewer to decide to remove the negative review altogether. While not common, I have worked with clients where this can be achieved, more times than you might expect.

One-star review removed! Success, right?

Probably not (yet).

During the peak of the 2015 tax season, at ClientWhys, we had a tax accounting client run into a scenario almost identical to the one described above. He and his firm garnered a lovely one-star review on Yelp.  While it wasn’t his first review--I believe it was his second--it had a very negative impact on his overall ratings. When searching for his firm’s name, sure enough, the low Yelp rating showed up on page one of the Google search results, right next to his firm’s name in the review rich snippet.

(For more advanced users, these graphical stars and review ratings in Google and other search engine results are called “rich snippets” – they are a special type of data that search engines look for in the “code” of review websites).

Fortunately for this tax professional, the review was subsequently removed -- likely due to a change of heart on the part of the reviewer.

After the review was removed, when searching for that pro's name in Google, you might assume the star ratings would be adjusted in Google immediately, right?  

Wrong.

In fact, for this business, it took nearly two months for the star ratings displayed in the Google rich snippet to reflect the removal of the one-star Yelp review and the addition of a new five-star review.

While changes to online reviews are often reflected in Google within “days,” we have seen multiple situations where it has taken weeks to months.

You may have heard the saying, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."  But in this case ,"What happens in Yelp (or Angie's List, TaxBuzz, Avvo, ZocDoc, etc.), can stay in Google (or Bing)" for pretty long time.

Yes, it can really take that long.

As of just last Thursday, June 2, after a quick Google search, I came across a Yelp review link and rich snippet for a IRS tax resolution firm in Houston (see screenshots).  The Google rich snippet and star ratings showed only four Yelp reviews and a 3.0 overall Yelp rating.

However, when clicking this link to visit the live Yelp profile, there was an additional fifth review, which was 5 stars--raising the overall star rating to 3.5. 

The five star review was placed on the Yelp profile nearly a month earlier (on 5/2/2016). Although it had been nearly a month, the old Google result was still showing only four reviews and the older, lower 3.0 rating. (Note: the Yelp profile has since been re-indexed in Google and, as of this writing, reflects the live profile page reviews and rating).

As of today’s writing, again after a quick search, I came across a Google result for Advanced Electrical Service, Inc. in Newport News, VA (see screenshots). 

The Google link to the Yelp profile shows a review rich snippet with one review and a 1.0 review score. However, when clicking the link from Google to visit the live Yelp profile, there actually were not yet any reviews for this business.

It is unclear if the reviewer removed the review or if it was removed by Yelp, however, the Google star rating and review rich snippet is clearly out of date by almost 30 days.

For this business, in the Google search result, I also clicked the “Cached” link -- you can find this by clicking the green, upside-down triangle to the right of the word “Electricians” in the breadcrumb trail of the Google result. I decided to check this cached page to see when the page was last indexed by Google. It appears the page was last indexed on May 6, 2016 (see screenshot, which also shows the one, 1-star review on the "cached" page).

If this page happens to be on a 30-day Google "re-crawl" cycle, there is a very good chance that within 24 hours or so from now (perhaps by the time you read this), the Google search result will have been updated.  

*** Check back on this post, I'll post an update when the reviews finally do get updated **

[UPDATE: June, 24, 2016: The 1 star on Google for Advanced Electrical Service Inc. was gone as of June 9, a few days after this post was published.  So it was >30 days between updates]

Even if a small business’ star ratings in Google stays outdated for just 30 days, imagine how damaging it could be to have a solitary one star review next to your name or business name in Google during the peak season for your practice or business.   Imagine a one star rating showing in Google at the start of tax season for a tax accountant… or showing one star for a retail business during the month of peak Holiday sales.  At the wrong time, one-star ratings like this could be devastating to a small, local business or practice.  

Search engine bots, indexing and time

The reason a bad (or good) review can continue to have a long-lasting, negative (or positive) impact on the search engine results is that Google and other search engines take time to reflect changes to web pages. Google’s “bots” are able to scan the vast Internet and billions of web pages only so often. Even with the massive processing power of Google’s servers, it would be impossible to reflect every change to every web page in the world at all times. Because of this, the re-crawling and/or re-indexing of any given web page happens at various intervals, lasting days or weeks (sometimes longer). Read more on this timing here or from a Google forum here.

Can anything be done to speed things up?

Yes, but there are no guarantees. If you find yourself or your business having outdated review scores and rating snippets on Google or other search engines, contact me and I will see what we can be done for you.

For more adventurous users or marketing agencies, below are a few things you should try.

Warning: Some of these suggestions (esp. after item #1) may get a little technical. However, feel free to geek out on the SEO if you like this kind of stuff… or if you prefer not to geek out, skip the steps after item #1…

1). Submit the review page to Google and Bing as a “new” page:

These links are normally used to submit new websites or new webpages to Google and Bing, but it can also be used to submit existing pages to be re-indexed:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?hl=en_uk&pli=1

https://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url

(thanks to Luis Valdez for this suggestion)

While he says it can take a week for the search engines to re-crawl the page, I have found it to be as fast as a few minutes in some cases, longer in others. Google says there are “no guarantees.”  However, it is certainly easy to do and worth trying and this just might do the trick for you.

2). Use Google Search Console “Fetch” tools:

If you have your own website for your business, you may have a Google Webmaster Tools account -- recently renamed Google Search Console (GSC) -- linked to your website. Your webmaster or online marketing agency should be able to help you with this.  Typically, you would use some of the GSC for sites you own to ask Google to “fetch” (aka re-crawl) pages on your own site.

However, I received a good suggestion from a search engine optimization (SEO) colleague at Martindale-Hubbell, Andy Simpson, on using this tool to indirectly ask Google to re-crawl pages on Yelp and other review sites: 

“A good way of having your Yelp listing re-crawled… is to have a section on your website something like ‘You can also find us on....’ … then have a link to your Yelp business listing. Go to Google Search Console and have that page re-indexed… with any luck Google will also crawl the external link to the Yelp listing you have.” 

By the way, if you are a tax accountant and get reviews on our site, TaxBuzz.com, we can use our own Google Search Console account to ask Google to re-crawl your TaxBuzz profile to help reflect any new reviews you receive. We can also do this when we manage accountant websites for our CPA and tax accountant clients.

3). Click on the “Cached” link in the Google search result

While this is just a personal theory of mine (I have no confirmation if it works or not), I have tested it a few times and it seems to work.

Search for your name or business name in Google (add “yelp.com” or similar to your search get the review page to review profile page show up). In the green “breadcrumb trail,” click on the upside-down triangle (see screenshot) and then click on the “Cached” link to bring up the most recently indexed page for the review site. At the very top of this page, click the “current page” link in the very upper left corner.

If you and others do this enough times, my theory is that it creates some signals that Google watches for to determine that a page is out of date and should be re-crawled. If you think about it, it makes sense. They may see this behavior and say, “Why are so many people clicking to see the cached page?  There must be something really interesting that used to be there, but that is no longer there on the live page.” I might certainly look for this behavior if I were them.  If anyone from Google reads this and can comment on whether or not this has any impact on the crawl frequency, I would be grateful.

4). Submit the web page to Google as outdated:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?pli=1

This process still requires the GSC tool and probably should only be used when all else fails.  This tool and process is a little more complicated and you have to get to the place where you can specify that the web page is outdated. While it is unlikely (and in some cases, undesirable) to have the page completely removed from Google (for which this process if mainly used), it may still help to get the page re-indexed if you mark it as out of date.

5). Ask Google and Bing to speed up their indexing of review rich snippets:

Another Google+ user, Isaac Hammelburger (thanks, Isaac), pointed out to me that Google's John Mueller recently commented that there should not be any “additional delay” beyond the usual crawl cycle to update the star ratings and review rich snippets beyond the normal cycle (which, per above, can take 4 weeks or longer).

Well, that’s a relief that it won’t be any longer than the 4 days to 4 weeks (or longer) to have the reviews updated on Google. However, after seeing the potentially poor user experience with outdated review snippets firsthand, I would highly recommend to Google and other search engines that they re-crawl rich snippet pages more frequently. It seems to me that search engines should treat review sites more like the content of blogs, social media sites, news sites, stock information sites and other frequently updated content sites.

Imagine if a stock price of a company displayed in Google was only updated every 30 days?  How rapidly and drastically would that get out of date?  Similarly, in the new reputation economy, where a business’ or practice’s review score is like its stock price, it would seem Google might consider updating the review rich snippet content much more frequently than once every 4 days to 4 weeks.

What you can do before you get the inevitable one-star review…

The best defense is a great offense. Rather than sticking your head in the sand or sitting around waiting for that one “bad” review to come through, go get some positive client testimonials and reviews today.

Our ClientWhys blog has some great suggestions for doing this here, here, here and here.  These are practical, easy ways to start building and protect your online reputation for any local, small practice or business, not just tax and accounting firms.

In addition, please join me for an upcoming free webinar where I will go through some easy, practical steps and tips to build your 5-star reputation.

If your very first review online is a one-star review, you may spend a lot of time (and many sleepless nights) digging yourself out of a hole. It will be even harder to garner positive reviews (and it may even plant negative seeds in the minds of your existing clients) to send your clients to a page with a negative one-star review as your first review.

On the other hand, if you generate lots of five-star testimonial reviews on various sites like Google, TaxBuzz, Yelp and others, any subsequent negative reviews should appear to be one-off’s… like disgruntled clients who are hard to please… or like the exceptions to the rule.

We have helped our clients get ten, twenty, thirty or even ninety, legitimate five-star client reviews on TaxBuzz.com and other review sites. See some of these TaxBuzz All-Stars here and a very nice success story here.  At ClientWhys and TaxBuzz, we would love to help you and your financial practice to build lots of positive, authentic testimonials and reviews from your clients across multiple sites on the Internet.

I'd love to hear from you on this topic:

• Have you or a colleague experienced issues in Google with delays in in updating your reviews and/or your website content? Any other suggestions to address this?
• Do you have other comment or questions on reputation building and/or garnering more positive reviews?

If so, or just to share your thoughts, please comment below.  Also please like and share the article on LinkedIn, thank you!

If you are a CPA, tax professional, bookkeeper or other financial professional and you would like a complimentary review of your online reputation and marketing, please use my online calendar to book some time with me:

https://demo.clientwhys.com/appointments/

Join our Free Webinar on June 22:

Please join me and our ClientWhys/TaxBuzz CEO, Lee Reams II, for our free webinar, “How to Build a Five-Star Practice”: 

https://try.clientwhys.com/five-star-practice/

Thank you!  Look for my next weekly blog post: "Who ARE those people on your LinkedIn profile?"

The opinions expressed in my LinkedIn blog are my own.  They may not reflect the views of any of my companies or employers and are meant to be educational and informational only.  I am also not an attorney and none of my opinions should be considered legal advice.

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