In their first step to distance themselves from Internet yellow book and review sites like Yelp, Google has quietly released an update that pulls reviews for local businesses from tweets, blogs, and other hyperlocal sites.
The amazing aspect of this new addition is the fact that some of the reviews Google is finding are off blogs that are completely out of context! It's almost like Google has people sitting around reading blogs just to find this type of information.
For example, a review about a personal trainer in Portland was pulled off a blog post that was about a marathon the blogger ran. The actual post was about working out in general, it was not meant to be a review for the trainer, but Google managed to find it and serve it up as one.
And here it is directly in the SERPs...
This amazingly intuitive feature has been called a "game changer" by some and may be the downfall of sites that thrive exclusively off review traffic. Yeah we're talking about all those big time review sites that are currently dominating the engines. Will the time come when your blog is snagging top rankings and people are saying...Yelp who? Only time will tell, but until then blog away and know that Google is paying attention.
