Within the last week, something went terribly wrong with the way Google Maps/Local displays consumer reviews from City Voter. In a nutshell, 5 Star reviews were converted to 1 Star rankings, making a whole lot of quality small businesses look like companies to avoid entirely. The more City Voter reviews, the worse a company’s reputation appears on Google today.
Mike Blumenthal explains the entire review reversal fiasco and the ensuing comments leave a trail of finger pointing as to where the fault lies. Josh Walker of City Voter said the site made the difficult decision to remove reviews from Google Maps for the time being.
Most reviews do look to be gone as of today, but that still hasn’t worked to restore the reputations of the companies affected by the snafu.
We’re just two weeks out from Mother’s Day, a major floral holiday, and numerous local brick & mortar stores have been hit with Google One Boxes that could very well wilt sales.
Rothe Florists of Philadelphia is celebrating its 101st year in business in 2009. Great reputation both locally and nationally and yet the shoppers searching for their company site are seeing a dismal One Star rating this weekend.
One Box Review Error
Completely undeserved, especially since they have 114 positive reviews on City Voter, it may well make their regular customers question whether the company has had serious, recent quality problems.
A century of successful business tells me they’ll weather this OK, but still – who wants to see his/her business displaying an unjust rating like that on Google?
Che Bella, a florist in San Diego, is another shop hit by the the review bug.
As badly as I feel for the Rothe family, this fine San Diego flower shop has been hit twice with Google Maps issues in the last year. Their listing was also a spammer highjack victim last fall. It took months to return the Google Ten Pack for their city and now they’ve been erroneously tagged with a One Star rating despite 35 rave reviews on City Voter.
The big lesson to be drawn for small businesses from this mess is to make sure your reviews come from a variety of sources. If you request consumers rate your company, suggest multiple consumer review sites so if another bug comes along, your hard earned reputation isn’t unfairly harmed in the process.
The best solution for these businesses would be for a swift update/correction to take place. Google should either fix these star ratings or remove them from the One Box store profiles immediately.
With Mother’s Day week representing more than 7% of annual sales for florists, these inaccurate ratings are the last thing any shop needs in a tough economy like we’re experiencing today.
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