Google Announces Changes to Places Pages

Local searchers and local businesses will see a fairly substantially different Place Page the next time they’re poking around Google Maps/Places. The company announceda new look Thursday and promises more changes to come.

The new layout of Place Pages puts a heavy emphasis on reviews. More specifically, it emphasizes reviews from Google users and no longer shows review content from third party sites. (Google had issues with both Yelp and TripAdvisor over review snippets last year, you may recall.)

Rather than showing external reviews, the new Place Page only links to third party sites after showing a selection of Google user reviews. The review emphasis is also obvious with not one, but two cherry red “Write a review” buttons. Here’s a look at an example Place Page with Google’s new look-and-feel. Read the full article at searchengineland.com.