How to get reviews into Local Search?

[kevsta]

as per the title, anyone know how we get a sites product reviews to show up in the local search results? any special tricks?

[LifeinAsia]

Local search usually has to do with physical stores. Not sure how products would be included in those results... You're talking apples and oranges.

[kevsta]

not really, but I was probably being too cryptic.

the product in this case is hotels. there's plenty of them (hotel reviews) in the one box from all the usual travel suspects.

those apples :)

[jimbeetle]

Being one of the usual travel suspects helps ;-). Basic local stuff starts with complete address, zip/postal code, etc. And you might want to take a look at this tagged facts [webmasterworld.com] thread; methinks it might be perfect (at least for Google), to designate locations as per the examples.

[kevsta]

heh heh of course :)

although I think we have enough wellie to get involved.

and thanks for that thread, thats interesting stuff.

so am I correct in assuming Google rounds these reviews up for these places automatically from various sites and shows them by the hotel in question?

and then they have rank again to show in that index?

[anallawalla]

so am I correct in assuming Google rounds these reviews up for these places automatically from various sites and shows them by the hotel in question?

Google is currently running a trial to random users where a result includes ratings from citysearch (USA) and similar providers. There is a special tagging protocol and once we see it released publicly we will know if any site using those tags can be featured with that information.

[Silvery]

Google Maps has partnered with a number of content providers to use their reviews/ratings along with numerous other business info parameters.

If you notice, Google Maps ratings are often derived from adding the ratings from all the various info provider sources into one combined rating.

You'd have to contact Google Maps' business development people to set up an arrangement for using your site/company as an info provider in that case.

I suspect that anallawalla's trial data submission method is likely based upon the data format for Google Maps' normal business data partner format.

[phranque]

if you have a google maps local business center listing there is a tab on the listing for the "customer" (or whatever is appropriate) to review the provider of goods and/or services.

[Philosopher]

phranque is spot on. Your reviews can be submitted directly to Google using that tab and as Silvery mentioned they also gather reviews from other sources such as Yelp and a few other sites.

I've had the best luck with reviews that were submitted directly to Google by "customers".

[zuko105]

Bam! hreview [microformats.org]

Associate those with the hcard properly and let Google crawl those pages. It's as close to a standard as there currently is and I've found that this works well for the time being before any other guidelines are released.

Yahoo seems to like it as well, but don't rely on Slurp to crawl and index them at any respectable rate.

Lemme know if you have any questions.

Zuko Out!

edit: spelling