Reviewcentre.com Reviews – AdWords Seller Ratings Fiasco
In a big slap in the face for any AdWords advertiser who has put effort into getting reviews on reviewcentre.com, the site has been removed from the list of third party review sites Google uses that counts towards your lovely little yellow stars on your AdWords ads (AdWords Seller Ratings).
When I spoke with Google support about it they said that the initial problem was that their crawlers were unable to crawl the reviewcentre.com web site. But when pushed on when it would be fixed and when all the reviews that had been removed would be put back again, they were very vague on the details, and the short summary is that it might be fixed at some point in the future, but there was no guarantee. Apparently it is not an arbitrary decision on Google’s part but also something to do with the owners of Review Centre (America readers, note this is the English UK spelling).
When I asked if this was likely to happen with other third party review sites without notice, I was told that this was unlikely as ll the sites listed here supply Google with a feed, so there won’t be any problems crawling the data. Though I notice on the previous link that Google now say specifically:
Seller ratings are now calculated using review services that license their information to us, so you might see changes to how they appear for your account. This improvement in data quality will make seller ratings more accurate.
I’m not sure on what date this text was added. But I am assuming that the terms under which reviewcentre.com “license their information to us” is the problem. Google are probably angry that they are not getting the information free of charge and have decided to show them who is boss (maybe I’m being unfair here).
The lesson to be learned here is that Google can decide at any time to stop using any third party service, and there is *nothing* you can do about it. So, if you have an email autoresponder which asks customers for reviews, it would be prudent to modify it as soon as possible to ask for reviews on more than one third party review site!
*Update* – Here is an official response from the Review Centre Google+ page on 19th March :-
Hi +Jordan McClements we do not currently have any plans to allow Google to have our reviews for seller ratings. If this changes we’ll announce it on G+.
Thanks