Negative review snippet from positive review in google knowledge panel

[Garrett Sussman]

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to share this interesting experience with reviews this morning and see if anyone had any thoughts.

I received an email that one of my reviews for a local Starbucks got a few likes. So I went to check out the GMB page and saw that a sentence from my review was featured.

Here's the featured portion:



Surprisingly, they took a negative sentence from my 5 star review to feature. In fact, it's literally the only negative thing I said in the review. Here's the full text:



I'm just curious if others feel like this is a case of keywords standing out in the algorithm regardless of sentiment, or if maybe it purposefully picked out the opposite sentiment. I'd assume it's the former, and that again highlights the importance of the actual text content in reviews.

Especially with seeing more feature review snippets in the local pack, it's something for business owners to be wary of.

Thoughts?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Good to point out Garrett. It's really unfortunate when the algo does this.

I've seen complaints of snippets that were really bad. Like a patient says:
"I love Dr Jones, my previous Dentist was a jerk and overcharged me."
And of course the snippet for nice Dr Jones reads:
"Dentist was a jerk and overcharged me."

Not a solution in general because you can't always know the customer and get them to edit their review... but just totally out of curiosity. Wonder if you edited/deleted that whole paragraph... A) How long would it take to update snippets? Will current snippet drop off? B) Would they pick another snippet from your review and if so, which one?

 

[Garrett Sussman]

Thanks for the reply, Linda. Your client's experience is interesting, yet extremely frustrating as well!

It's a neat experiment idea. I'm a fan of that starbucks location, so I'm happy to remove the 'negative' paragraph and see what happens with the snippet.

I'll keep you posted on this thread if I see any changes.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Great! Will be an interesting experience, just so we know the flow and timing as well as what the algo chooses to replace that snippet.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Not a solution in general because you can't always know the customer and get them to edit their review...

This is a good place to mention your post on the subject of: How To Get Your Unhappy Customers To Change a Bad Review Or in this case how to get them to change a positive review with a bad snippet. After this experiment we'll know what to expect.

 

[Garrett Sussman]

Yes! I'll definitely update Andrew's article with the results of this review edit experiment!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Garrett,

That's really interesting and I'm very curious to see if the Snippets change after you edit your review.

Thanks for sharing

Sent from my XT1650 using Tapatalk

 

[Garrett Sussman]

Cheers, Colan!

Checked this morning and my snippet hasn't changed.

That said, a new snippet appeared and replaced the penguins/ice coffee one. I'm not sure what insight that provides other than the fact that featured review snippets can be fluid and have different moving parts?

Will continue to check and update.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Interesting. What your case tells me is that Google doesn't really care if the snippet is positive or negative per se, they want to show a snippet that is meaningful to the customer. And in your case, that one part of the review that comes off as negative is actually the most useful to know as a potential customer reading the snippets

 

[Garrett Sussman]

So an update today:

Checked this morning after the weekend, and it does look like my review snippet has been removed altogether.

The new snippet that replaced mine was actually the original snippet that was there when I noticed my negative snippet in the first place:



So one takeaway is that after about 5 days, the deleted portion of my review that appeared in the snippet has been removed. I'll try to check that KP every few weeks to see if another snippet of mine appears.

The KP in question has 35 reviews, and mine was the only one that's been 'liked' (with 2 thumbs up)

Hope others find this helpful!