I’m not sure what changes are happening behind the scenes at Google, but I received two frantic emails today from clients that saw their review counts practically disappear.  Honda Cars of Bellevue had a total of 42 reviews showing on Google Places last week, and this is how things look today:

Acton Toyota last week had over 1,000 reviews last week and this is what their Google Places listing looks like today, November 8, 2010:

Is anyone else seeing their Google Places review counts dropping?  It looks like there is a bug in their system that is going to be hurting many businesses.

The wait is over. DealerRater.com customers can now rejoice as Google Maps will now include the “star” counts on DealerRater on Google Maps. As you can see from the screen shot below, dealers like Marlboro Nissan with over 300 positive reviews, will benefit from this new change. Prior to this change, Marlboro Nissan had less than 10 review stars showing.

When Google Maps displays listings of car dealers, as shown below, it has been proven that high star counts increase click-through rates. With over 330 reviews displayed for Marlboro Nissan, their Google Maps traffic will surely increase. Their Internet Reputation Management program will really pay off now.

And when you click on the details for each dealer, you can see how well DealerRater.com reviews dominate the page:

Reputation Management Services

Congratulations to Chip, Matt, and the entire DealerRater.com team for getting this integration completed. Dealers looking for assistance and training to setup strong reputation management processes can contact PCG Digital Marketing for an IRM proposal.

Dealers who have a successful Reputation Management (IRM) program in place and that have been able to get their customers to post reviews on DealerRater.com have a new choice on how to display their positive reviews. DealerRater.com now offers dealers that ability to get their reviews via an RSS feed.

The RSS feed will allow you to place the stream of customer reviews on a blog using a RSS widget. Of you prefer a full screen version of the reviews, you can use the DealerRater.com Javascript snippet which can drop into most any blog page. The great thing about these two choices is that they update in real-time as more positive reviews are posted on DealerRater.com.

The DealerRater.com RSS feed can look like on a WordPress Blog:

The DealerRater.com Javascript Snippet can look like on a wider website page:

Auto Dealer Reviews

Keep in mind that this is just one source for reviews posting. You can display great reviews from multiple review websites if you create a compilation of multiple RSS feeds and weed out any negative reviews.

It is very important to leverage your positive reviews on the static pages of your website. Reviews from customers that live in the towns in your PMA can be a fantastic way to create search optimized pages that include your brand and the city names that surround you.

Setup Google Alerts and Google Reader

All dealer principals and members of the senior management team should be using free tools like Google Alerts or Google Reader to track what people are saying about you online.

You can be notified by email as soon as your dealership name or the name of your employees are used in an article that Google indexes. There are paid services that offer a nice interface to view articles that use your name for a fee but until you decide to spend for that convenience, please setup these free tools.

The sooner you know what is being said about your dealership, the sooner you can decide how to respond. One nice advantage to being a DR Certified Dealer is that you have two weeks to resolve any compliant before anything harmful gets permanently posted.