Yelp succeeds in search engine suicide?

Last month, an onstage conversation between Yelp’s CEO and Google’s VP of product management at TechCrunch’s “Social Currency Crunchup” revealed an uneasy tension over how the former’s content was crawled for Google’s Place Pages. In short, Google’s new feature for its Maps service was using data crawled from Yelp’s business reviews and listings for relevant content generation; rather than sending users to the Yelp site, Google was sending Yelp’s data to users.

Obviously, Yelp was less than satisfied with this arrangement, particularly as it had previously given Google access to this data as part of a now defunct partnership, only to see it taken from them without express permission.However, to many in the SEO world, their problem was outweighed by its benefits – organic search visibility. Given the huge range of keywords that Yelp would need to target to get each of its own ‘place pages’ ranking organically, many questioned whether their CEO’s solution (listing in organic search but removed from Places) was a sensible idea.

It appears as though CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has had his wish though. According to a report by TechCrunch yesterday, Google has now omitted Yelp reviews entirely from Google Places.

Later that day, a Google spokesperson confirmed that Yelp’s reviews would no longer appear in Places, though their content may be linked in the “More about this place” tab – a general collection of links to pages deemed relevant to a business or place.

“Regarding the presentation of Yelp review snippets, neither of us was happy with the data as it appeared, so we reclassified results from Yelp while we reviewed our options,” said a Google Spokesperson. “This means that, for the time being, Yelp Pages may not appear as review snippets in Place page results….We are working with Yelp to more intelligently crawl and present results from their site.”

Whilst this may be what Yelp has said they want, as Chris Crum of WEBPRONEWS suggests until the situation changes again, Yelp’s competitors will be getting more exposure and links from Places. It does seem unlikely that users will stop searching for local business information – and using the Places page – just because Yelp’s reviews are no longer listed, even if they are more extensive than most of its competitors.