Small Business Saturday – Disallowed Review

A Great Review Disallowed by Google

When I went to Pubcon last month, I got invited to the first annual US Search Awards, as a guest of SEMpdx advisory board member Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink.

About 2pm on the day of the awards, I was checking to see what time I had to be there, and I noticed it was “Black Tie Requested”. Uh oh. Anywhere I go at a conference has been pretty informal and a few years ago I quit bringing even a tie and sports jacket, so all I had were cargo shorts and jeans.

I didn’t want to be “that one guy”, so I panicked for a minute… Then I thought about just buying something acceptable, but there really was almost no time after the sessions ended, so I whipped out my phone and I searched for “tuxedo rental”.

The first thing I saw of course was a Google Adwords Ad and a call button, so I clicked it. I got a message telling me to leave a message, so I hung up and called the next one, and a guy answered the phone.

Six hours later I looked like this:

Now I think Al did an amazing job,  by performing an urgent service in the most fantastic way possible,  so like any good customer might do, I left him a quick review at Google, and wished him well, thanking him profusely.

This is a snapshot of my review, that I just happened to notice while dinking around at home on the weekend…

 

 

Wait, what?

What could possibly be the problem here, Google? My review doesn’t adhere to your policies? I’ve read them throughly, and there’s nothing that could possibly be misconstrued.

Anyone working for the local search reviews quality team (does that exist, @davidmihm?) could EASILY look at my profile and see that I’m a real person, clearly not leaving fake reviews, so why would you punish him?

Google has arbitrarily decided to take away not only a possible ranking factor for him but a likely influencer of another customers decision whether to hire him or not.

Does the fact that I’m an internet marketer in my Google+ biography somehow invalidate myy review? And if so, then why not invalidate all of my reviews?

Jeez, it’s not as if I was his page manager or something… Is Google implying that I might be leaving fake reviews for pay? I’m offended!

Small Business Saturday

Today is Small Business Saturday, so I thought I’d show my support by helping Al out, and helping Google out by reposting the review here, and I even used structured data so they can figure it out..

To be clear to any lurking Google spam team members with nothing better to do, he is not a client, and I have no dog in the local tux market in Las Vegas or anywhere else.  I am simply a happy customer that left him a great review, but you’ve chosen to disallow it, so I’ll leave it for you again here.

My review:

He Deserves The Review

Local SEO rankings aside, he deserves a link too, one that is *not* nofollowed,  and shouldn’t have to be.   He did not pay me to link to him, or give anything in trade (other than provide great service), Google, so don’t even be thinking about penalizing his organic rankings either with some sort of manual action.

Just like there was nothing illegitimate about my review, there’s nothing illegitimate about the editorial link I’ve placed here either,   and if it happens to help him rank better for “Las Vegas tux rental” because of it, then don’t hold it against him either.  He deserves it.