New building ownership and NAP - strategies for removing old listings with bad reviews
-
I have a question based on this scenario: An apartment building changes ownership. Previous owners were terrible and online listings have had terrible reviews. Since the apartment building now has a new brand name, new office address and phone number, the new owners want to create new online listings instead of claiming the old listings with the bad reviews. Also they want to report the old listings as "closed". They would like to remove the old listings with bad reviews from the old management and old brand name and start fresh, since they plan many improvements. Has anyone tried this strategy? How much luck has anyone had rebranding an apartment building and reporting old business listings as closed?
-
My pleasure, Robert! I liked your answer, too
-
Miriam,
Thanks for these links; they are quite helpful!
-
Hey Dragon!
Robert is offering good advice. I'll just add a few things here.
Different platforms have different policies on this. For example, look at this conversation on TripAdvisor about ownership changes and old reviews: http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g1-i12105-k7183031-Removing_bad_reviews_with_new_ownership-TripAdvisor_Support.html
And here's a good discussion of the details of Google's policy: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/Vz8WIPI95M4;context-place=topicsearchin/business/new$20ownership$20reviews
And here's Yelp's section on what to do in a variety of scenarios surrounding a change of ownership/management:
http://www.yelp-support.com/Reporting_Business_Changes?l=en_US
So, I'm mentioning the above because it will likely be worth it to handle this on a platform-by-platform basis, researching general best practices and deciding how to proceed.
Hope this helps!
-
I think you will run into some problems with this:
** Since the apartment building now has a new brand name, new office address and phone number, the new owners want to create new online listings instead of claiming the old listings with the bad reviews. Also they want to report the old listings as "closed". **
Let's say I own an Apt complex or other business and I suck at it. I realize that all the bad reviews are killing me so I go out and change my business name and office address and then try to report all as new... This is the same thing even though your intent is different. This is one of the tactics used by "reputation management" firms of the less than notable variety. So, I do think you will run into issues and you need to tread quite softly.
Can it be done... maybe; but be prepared for issues with trying this approach. I think a danger you could face is that Google can look at it as simple reputation management play and you can then have trouble ever getting it to list. While we do not do reputation management, we do get clients who come to us due to Local problems who are now not showing up in Local from doing things that are outside terms of service. It is really hard to fix these.
Remember that in Local, the key is NAP. Name, Address, Phone. You are changing two of the three ( I realize you say there is a new office address but people will not search for the new office address and you are going to run into issues with the actual address of the apartments.) What are you going to do when someone searching for the apartment address gets the old listing. Remember there will be a ton of citation sources with old info.
With apartments, your other issue will be citation sources like Yelp or the BBB. Are they going to buy what you have to say about the management change, etc.? My guess is that is also going to be a bit tough to sell. With the new name, are you using a new URL and redirecting any value from the old? If so, you are trying to use what is helpful and jettison what is not, which again makes people question.
So, you might be better with getting new reviews showing the behaviors have changed and using a lot of under new management content, etc. Saying you are going to change is not inspiring at all. Even in your question you say the new management "...plan many improvements." That is not change, that is planned change. Show people the improvements in everything you do and make it clear it is not the same. Then even with the bad original reviews, when you start getting good reviews you will have much higher legitimacy.
Hope that helps even though there is no clear yes or no,
Robert
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to make Google show reviews from Facebook and Google My Business?
I wonder if there is anything I can do to increase the chance that Google shows stars that indicate the average score of our reviews from Facebook or Google MyBusiness for the keywords where we rank nr. 1, for instance our brand name?
Reviews and Ratings | | AudunBK0 -
Poor reviews and ratings
I have an interesting challenge for a new client. Basically, they collect payment from gym users whose monthly subscription payment has failed, and they charge the gym user a fee and not the gym. Their clients love them for this, but the end consumer hates them and as a consequence, every review or ratings site from Google Reviews to Trustpilot is universally filled with angry consumers who didn't read the Ts and Cs of their gym membership. Understandable, but it also means the client can't have a presence on any social channel as they simply become a gripe board for disgruntled consumers. My question is, how are the poor reviews impacting on rankings and domain authority and should I treat this like any other client in terms of fixing crawl issues and seeking quality backlinks or am I always going to be pushing water uphill? Cheers gang!
Reviews and Ratings | | Algorhythm_jT0 -
PPC: How do we get our reviews into AdWords?
Hi there, I know that Google have sadly discontinued ratings extension in AdWords but does anyone know a get-around for this? If possible, we'd like to show off the good reviews we have from Google My Business' Knowledge Panel in our ads. We're an online product/service so I don't want to link GMB through the location extension if possible (it doesn't make sense for anyone to pay us a visit in real life). Is there a better way of linking our AdWords to our GMB or is there an alternative extension/ AdWords feature we can use to get review ratings in our ad? Thanks 🙂
Reviews and Ratings | | Fubra0 -
Purchasing and rebranding practice with bad reviews
An optometrist is looking to buy a practice with really bad Google reviews. They want to rebrand it under their name. This practice has pretty bad SEO as well. What should they do? Should they just mark the GMB page as permanently closed then make a new one under the new business name? Or is that risky or considered spammy since the "new" practice is also an optometrist? Could Google think it is a duplicate or an attempt to trick them?
Reviews and Ratings | | Mike-i0 -
Best process for asking customers to leave reviews?
This might be too off-topic for Moz, but I think many of us might face the same issue, so I thought I would ask. Love them or hate them, we get 90% of our business from being #1 on Trip Advisor. My biggest competition is trying very hard to take over that #1 spot, so we are working to keep it. Has anyone found a seamless way to ask customers for TripAdvisor reviews? We email, text, ask over the phone. But here the problem, Trip Advisor is not the easiest site to leave a review on. If you are on your phone, they want you download the app. Some people don't like to download apps. Or, if they have the app already and click "yes" to open the site in the app, it goes to the app store instead. There doesn't seem to be as much of an issue on the PC, but most people do everything from their phones now. And if something is a little bit hard, people are less likely to go out of their way to leave a review. So, here's my question. Has anyone found a better way? Maybe a form on my website? Or a process that seems to work better? This does have some SEO implications in that my Trip Advisor page does show up in search results quite a bit as well as much home page. Sometimes they are #2 and #3 together.
Reviews and Ratings | | CalicoKitty20002 -
Combining reviews and duplicate content
We have some items in different colors or slightly different styles. For example if there is one series of helmets with almost same features and if we have many item pages we get reviews for each one seperate. We want to combine the reviews to increase our conversion rates. For example if style1 gets 5 reviews and style 2 gets1 review and style 3 has zero reviews combining them will help style 2 and style 3 conversion rates. Our review system cannot put all these reviews in one page. So if we combine reviews each page will have duplicate review content. Will this be bad for SEO?
Reviews and Ratings | | rbai0 -
Do schema review numbers have to be manually updated?
Hi! I've had success with review schema rendering in SERPs but have had to manually code the numbers and update those numbers as more reviews come in (which is a bit time-consuming). Is there a way to use auto-generated numbers that will still render schema or do those numbers have to be manually added? I've looked at the schema for sites like IMDB, and their schema numbers seem to be manually added, which seems like a huge lift. Advice/input is appreciated!
Reviews and Ratings | | 199580 -
Google reviews only show up in local results, right?
Two quick questions: 1. google reviews only show up in local results right? 2. If you're 100% e-commerce business with no office location, can you even get a google review? Thanks, Ruben
Reviews and Ratings | | KempRugeLawGroup0