Forum Moderators: anallawalla & bakedjake
Recently had a #1 position for an extremely competitive local term, but as of today, we dropped from A to G in the lucky 7. Now, we currently have about 100+ reviews (all legit) and had been #1 for almost a year. We also have links from local authority sites with a devise anchor text portfolio Any insight/advice would be greatly appreciated!
If it's extremely competitive, maybe it's just that your competitors have you beat in some of the other factors. Review quantity is obviously not the only ranking factor in Local search.
However, I think it's possible that they may have been mostly referring to whether reviews are positive/negative or high/low. I think it's possible that the quantity of reviews does have some influence -- more reviews, whether good or bad, could indicate relative popularity. And, if the reviews are from sites where Google has a higher level of trust that the reviews are less-gamed.
But, rmjvol is pointing in the right direction as far as I'm concerned: there are a lot of different factors which appear to influence ranking in Google Maps and the 7-pack, so you need to consider all the other factors involved.
Just two "for-instances":
- Citations have appeared important to rankings in the last few years -- is the business mentioned with some frequency in various places?
- Could the site have lost a valuable inlink in the recent past? Maybe they participated in a charity event last year, and didn't this year, thus losing an important link from a .ORG site or somesuch?
