Reviews Impact Rankings
Mary Bowling | 4 February 2008 |
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Online consumer reviews have such an enormous impact on the Hospitality and Travel Industries that it’s impossible to ignore them. Reviews can entice potential customers to use your facilities and/or services or - fairly or unfairly - they can drive you out of contention.
Did you know that reviews can also impact your rankings on influential social and local websites? Here’s how:
On some websites, like Insider Pages, listings are moved up and down in the directory according to the recommendations members have given a business. Well-rated businesses rise to the top while poorly rated ones fall to the end of the list. Those at forefront can expect many, many more referrals from the website than the also rans or those with few or no reviews.
On other sites, the user has the option of sorting the results by several factors and one of these is often ratings. In Yahoo Travel. for instance, visitors may choose to sort by Yahoo Picks, Price, Ratings and Name. Users may also ask to see only those hotels with high ratings, which means the lower rated ones won’t even get on their radar.
On some Local platforms, such as Yahoo! Local, reviews actually enter into the algorithm. First, a business must get enough reviews to meet a predetermined threshold. While Yahoo! won’t tell us what that threshold is, I suspect it may not be an absolute number, but is relative to the category and the competition within it. Once the minimum number of reviews is attained, they begin to affect placement in the rankings.
Click through rates and quick back clicks are used by the Search Engines to measure the relevance of their search results. Relevant results get more clicks. And when people go to pages relevant to their search and stay there, instead of immediately going back to the results pages, the Search Engines flag those pages as being relevant and will factor it into how they are ranked. In instances where your listing is accompanied by good reviews, you can expect more clicks. The opposite is also true - listings with poor reviews will get fewer clicks and therefore, not be considered as relevant. So, as you can see, good reviews can help your rankings and bad ones can hurt them.
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