Google and Yelp Seem to Settle on Places

I’ve opined that Google is far more feared than Microsoft ever was as it can use your own content to compete with you and there is little if anything you can do about it. As an example I mentioned Yelp reviews were being scraped by Google to include in their Faces service. Moreover, I pointed out a staggeringly high 57% of Yelp’s traffic comes from Google so altering their site so Google can’t crawl it would be search engine suicide.

The solution seems to be a truce of sorts where Yelp reviews show up on Google search results but not on Places pages. Expect Google to make a massive push to beef up its user-generated content. And in case you were wondering, according to Alexa, traffic to Yelp from Google is the exact same 56.62% but it’s worth watching to see if this compromise hurts Yelp’s traffic over time.

One further wonders if the stage is now set for dictionary and weather service companies to reach out to Google in order to have their content no longer used in a disintermediary fashion which keeps traffic once-destined to these sites from getting there.

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