First, Google has really improved the ease of editing a business listing. It’s easier both for business owners to claim their listing and for others to make community edits to a listing. At the top right, there’s now an obvious checkmark & “Owner-verified listing” if the business is verified.

Non-verified listings replace this with 2 simple links: “Edit this place – Business owner?” Previously, the link to claim a business listing on Google was buried several clicks away. Nice improvement.

The second and third changes escalate the prominence of consumer reviews. At the top of the page, Google now displays selected review snippets just below the business description.

Google has also added a “What people are saying about” section. It looks like they’re automatically slicing & dicing phrases from the consumer reviews to come up with scores for each category. On Salon Disegno in Lawrenceville, the categories are staff, prices, atmosphere, service and customer service. Notice that each category shows a single snippet but I clicked to view all of the “Staff” related comments.

Mike Blumenthal points out that these categories only display on listings with at least 11 reviews. It also appears that Google needs to recognize/classify at least 3 comments for a category to show up.

It’s interesting to note that the original reviews are still there. Google has effectively tripled the prominence of consumer reviews on the Place Pages with these changes.

Based on these changes, it’s pretty clear that Google values consumer reviews. If you don’t already have a plan in place to monitor and manage consumer reviews on the review sites that Google trusts, now’s the time.

There was a good discussion on this at Mike Blumenthal’s blog. General consensus was that Google removed them while trying to fix how they were improperly applying Authoritative One Boxes for some searches.

Today, I’m seeing the 7 pack back but only when the search contains a word like “in” or “near” within the search phrase. So you get a 7 pack on “web design in Nashville TN” but no 7 pack on “web design Nashville TN”

2 possibilities:
1) Google is slowly rolling out the 7 pack on these searches & it’s just not fully implemented.
2) Google decided that some searches should not have geo specific results ie. web designers and ad agencies are much less dependent on their local area vs someone like a salon or a bathroom remodeling contractor.

I’d say the the 2nd option is much more likely. While we may see it change again in the future, searchers looking for services like websites, advertising & marketing are more likely to consider an out of town provider. OTOH, I think most businesses are more comfortable working with a provider in their area so maybe we’ll see some additional boost to local businesses.