Review gating is the process of controlling the generation of public reviews so they are mostly positive.

This may be as simple as only asking for reviews from people you know will leave a positive review or controlling the flow of reviews via software so that only people who rate you highly are redirected to leave a public review while anyone with a negative sentiment is directed to leave private feedback.

Some online review services have made Review Gating against their terms of service and your account may be banned or removed if you are found to be using review gating with these services.

Review gating examples

Businesses have been gating reviews since reviews were a thing. It’s only natural to want good reviews over bad reviews.

Some way you might gate your reviews are:

• Asking for a review after first checking if a customer is happy
• Sending review requests via email or text and asking the reviewer to rate you before sending you to leave a public review only when your rating is higher than certain value

Why review gating is prohibited

Review sites such as Google, Facebook and Yelp want their users to feel they can trust the reviews they are reading.

While the reviews that you receive when gating reviews might be genuine, they are overwhelmingly positive.

This leads to a biased view of your business on the review site.

If reviews on a service cannot be trusted users will not return when looking for more businesses.

Which review services prohibit review gating?

Some of the major review sites have started prohibiting review gating in their terms of service.

These include Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), Yelp, Trustpilot and Tripadvisor.

Service	Policy	Link
Google Business Profile	Prohibited	Prohibited and restricted content
Facebook	No Policy
Yelp	Prohibited	Don't ask for Reviews
Trustpilot	Prohibited	Best Practices for creating review invitations
Tripadvisor	Prohibited	Content Fraud FAQ

Will review gating get me in trouble?

If you are found to be using review gating the most likely outcome is your reviews will be removed or suppressed on your profile.  However, in some cases your profile may be banned or removed.

Do you need to gate your reviews?

All of your reviews don’t have to be positive. In fact, most people don’t trust profiles with a perfect 5 star rating, they think the is something suspicious and there usually is.

Many people prefer businesses with a good but more natural rating of between 4.2 and 4.6.

People also want to read your negative reviews, to see what was said but also how you responded.

Tools like myPresences allow you to request reviews from your customers and then gate their responses, but you should only use it when generating reviews on sites that do not prohibit its use.  We encourage you to leave it off and allow all users to leave a public review.

Try a free 14 day trial of myPresences and see how easy it is to get new authentic reviews on autopilot.

It’s been on your todo list for years. Online is becoming more and more important to your business.  You keep hearing how important it is to have good reviews and ratings.

It’s time to do something.

You decide to start by logging into your existing profiles and listings so you can see where you stand.

But, if you are like many business owners you don’t have access to your accounts, profiles and listings.

Who created the listings?

Where are the usernames and passwords?

Which email address was used to create the account?

In many businesses the accounts may have been created by someone who is no longer with the business.

They may have left and not recorded the account details centrally or recorded it on their own computer using a spreadsheet that is now long lost.

Many businesses give up at this point, it’s all too hard. They lose that amazing momentum and enthusiasm they had and the business’s online presence remains stagnant.

This is often the biggest roadblock in managing the online presence and reputation of businesses.

What are the causes of lost login credentials?

It is so easy to do.  You want to create a profile for your business on an online service, you are excited to get started and see how the service works and how it can benefit your business.

You create an account with an email address for the business.  Quite often this is your personal email address at the business or even just a personal email.

You quickly create a password, maybe one you use all the time or something using a pattern you often use.

The credentials are stored in your browser and you continue to use the service while you get setup.

Maybe you go to a personal passwords spreadsheet and update it there.

Quite often the person may have left the business and the login credentials are gone with them.

If your business is not using business wide password management  or a centrally agreed place and procedure to manage accounts then chances are the business will never know the credentials for this new account.

Why is it difficult to get access to your lost accounts?

The main problem with regaining access to your accounts is there are a lot of online services and each one has a different process to claim access to accounts on their platform.

Some of them will be quick and easy and others may require a protracted process to prove ownership.

In some cases there will be no way to gain access and the best approach is to remove the old profile and create a new one you control.

If the email address used to create the original account is on your business domain it may help.

Best Practices in managing your login credentials

You don’t want to face this situation again, if you go to the trouble of regaining access to your lost accounts your want to put a process in place so that business accounts are created and managed using policies and procedures that are centrally managed and understood

Some things that need to be defined are:

• Who needs to have access.
• Where are the credentials stored.
• Which services are credentials stored for.
• How do people access the business wide credentials.
• How do I update the credentials.
• How do I add credentials for a new service.
• What is the process when people leave the business.

Once you are accepted to the translation team for a particular language you will be given access to the translation interface where you will be able to directly translate the myPresences interface.

If you have multiple team members translating please let us know their email addresses so they can also access the translation process.

Each translator must have a myPresences login, add them as users on your account.

Translating

Once you have access you will be able to access the translation interface at:

https://app.mypresences.com/rosetta/

If you receive an access denied message this means your mypresences account does not have access. Please contact support to have it added.

The dashboard will show you how much of myPresences has been translated.

Select the file you want to translate.

This interface will allow you to translate each string into your language and track translation progress.

Use the filter options at the top to work on untranslated content only.

As soon as you make changes they will be saved.

However, the changes won’t be visible until we clear the translation cache, this should happen at least once per day.  Please let us know if you have made translations and we will clear the cache for you.

Translation Advice

1. If a msgid is multiline you can translate this into one long line if that is easier.
2. Variable placeholders are not translated, leave them as they appear in the msgstr field.  These fields start with a %. Eg. %(business_name)s
3. Variable placeholders can be moved around in the string, but they must exist in the translated string. If there is more than one variable they all must exist and the order can be changed.
4. Some strings will contain html tags (eg. <a> <p></p>).  Do not translate anything inside square braces <> and </>.
5. When verifying the translation have the same page open in 2 seperate browsers or browser windows to compare the 2.  You can change the language used by one of the browsers in the settings for the browser.
6. After changing the language of the browser doing a page refresh should update the page to use the chosen language.

Page Authority (commonly referred to as PA) is a measure of how well a single url will rank in search results (SERP’s) and is developed by Moz, one of the major SEO platforms. Page Authority is a logorithmic scale from 0 to 100 with a higher number indicating that the page should rank better in general than lower PA urls.

How does myPresences work with Page Authority?

myPresences tracks the page authority of your homepage so you can see how it changes over time and you are alerted when it changes.

Domain Authority (commonly referred to as DA) is a measure of how well a domain or website will rank in search results (SERP’s) and is developed by Moz, one of the major SEO platforms. Domain Authority is a logorithmic scale from 0 to 100 with a higher number indicating that links on your domain should rank better in general than links on lower DA domains.

How does myPresences work with Domain Authority?

myPresences uses domain authority as one measure to help you:
Determine generally how your website compares to your competitors
Track changes in DA over time and know when your domain authority changes
See which online services you should list on by focusing on high DA services first

Schema Markup is structured information you add to your webpage to make it easier for automated programs such as search engine spiders to understand the nature and intent of the page. This allows you to give hints to the search engine about the page that they can incorporate into their algorithms and increase their understanding of your pages.

The most commonly used schema format is schema.org.

Schema markup can be added to you site in HTML tags or JSON-LD formats. Google recommends that the JSON-LD format be used.

How does myPresences help?

myPresences automatically generates schema for you based on your base profile in myPresences where you have specified the ideal information you would like online.

SERP refers to a Search Engine Results Page and is the page listing results for a search query entered on any Search Engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.In SEO terms SERP usually does not refer to one page but the set of pages returned for a particular search term.Modern SERP pages are becoming more sophisticated as search engines try to provide more value to the user and often include more than just links to search results.

SEO Companies that engage in rank tracking for your keywords most commonly focus on organic results but are increasing tracking Local and Paid rankings as well.

Organic Search Results

Organic search results refers to the results that are returned for a query that are the ranked based on the Search Engines ranking algorithm and the merits of the links. It is not possibe to pay to influence the organic results.

Local Search Results

Local search results only appear for search terms that the search engine determines to have local intent. This is usually when the searcher is looking for a local business and a special section is added above the organic results on page 1 with a list of the businesses that rank in local search for that search term.

Paid Search Results

Paid search results are those results where advertisers have paid to appear in the SERP for the search the user performed. Paid results are usually at the very top of each page but can appear anywhere on the page. If you need to rank quickly for a search query then using paid advertising can get you in front of your competition.

How myPresences helps

myPresences monitors your most important keywords and helps you understand how you and your competitors are performing in search engines.
Works with Google Organic, Google Paid, Bing Organic, Bing Paid, Google Maps and Bing Places<
Keywords can be tracked from any location (Google only)
We track not only your website rankings but each of your presences
See how much of page 1 is controlled by your business

The google snack pack appears at the top of a google search that has local intent and includes a small number of local business listings.

A local intent search is one that is centered around location. Such as:

• plumber near me
• restaurants in paddington
• electrician St Kilda
• accountant near long beach

The current version of the snack pack only shows 3 results on desktop and mobile.

For local businesses this is the most valuable realestate on the internet and getting into the snack pack (and being removed from the snack pack) can have a major influence on how much business you receive from online.

If you are a local business your goal is to be listed here for your local keywords.

The Google Snack Pack is also referred to as the Google Local Pack, Google 3 Pack or the Local 3 Pack and is shown below.

A Google Snack Pack entry tends to include:

• Business Name
• The rating and number of reviews on Google My Business
• The street address
• An indication of cost
• The main business type of the business
• Whether the business is currently open or closed and when it will open
• A photo thumbnail
• A short description or list of amenities

The information shown on your local pack entry is taken from your full Google My Business profile. So, if you are not listed on Google My Business you need to be listed to appear on the snack pack results..

How to get into the Google Snack Pack

First off, your business must be listed on Google My Business. If you are not, get listed on Google My Business straight away.

If your business is not currently in the snack pack for keywords that are important to your business then one of your most effective strategies to increase business online is to optimize your business so you appear as high as possible in the snack pack.

To increase your ranking in Google Maps so that you appear in the top 3 you should focus on the following:

• Create high quality and consistent citations on services with high authority for your business.
• Get a reasonable number of good but natural online reviews on your Google Business Profile listing and across the internet.
• Generate high quality backlinks to your website.
• Optimise your Google My Business listing to ensure it is complete and correct with good content like photos and posts.

How to check your position in the Google Snack Pack

Before checking how your business appears in the Google Snack Pack you should determine the local search keywords that are important to your business. These are the keywords your potential customers would use to find a business like yours online.

Now go to google in your browser and enter each of the keywords you identified.

If your business is not in the top 3 results click on the More Places link and look through the results until you find your business.

If your business is just outside the top 3 you have a real opportunity to get more business online by improving your online presence and getting into the top 3 so that you appear in the snack pack.

myPresences will automatically add search terms for your most important keywords when you add your business and continuously monitor your rankings.

Local Search Ads

If you want to get featured at the top of the Google Snack Pack quickly you can pay for ads using Google Local Ads.
Ads will appear at the top of the snack pack and will be marked as an ad.
Follow these instructions to setup google local ads.

History of the Google Snack Pack

The Google Snack Pack was originally called the Local Pack and was released in 2008 with 10 results. This was reduced to 7 results in 2009.

Due to the move to mobile first results on Google 3 entries was the optimal amount of results and in 2015 google started to show 3 results on desktop and mobile and this is when the name “Snack Pack” became prominent.

A backlink is a link from an external website to your website which helps build authority for your website. This will ultimately help your website rank better.

There are two types of backlinks: Follow Backlinks NoFollow BacklinksA natural backlink profile includes both follow and nofollow backlinks but a follow backlink is the best for your SEO as it will pass link value to your website.

Follow Backlinks

Follow backlinks are also called ‘DoFollow Backlinks’ and when you receive a follow backlink to your website this transfers some link value to your website. You should aim to get as many follow backlinks as you can from important sites (with higher Domain Authority). These links will help the pages they link to and pages on your website rank better.

NoFollow Backlinks

NoFollow links are explicitly marked with a nofollow value in the rel field of the link. This means the owner of the site does not vouch for the linked site and does not pass it any link value or ‘link juice’. NoFollow links are commonly used when the site does not have control over the links that are added and therefore will not pass on any seo value.

How Backlinks help your site rank

Google uses your backlinks as part of its algorithm to determine how to rank your website. The more good quality (High Domain Authority or Page Authority) dofollow links you have the better your website should rank.

Nofollow backlinks are also a small factor in that a website should have a good mix of follow and nofollow links, if a site only has follow links this may be considered suspicious.

How myPresences helps

myPresences helps you build backlinks to your website:

Local SEO is local search engine optimization and refers to the actions required to rank a business in local search on search engines such as Google and Bing.

Why is local SEO important?

Local SEO is very important to local businesses as searches with local intent are a very important source of traffic and ranking well for a local search term can mean that the business appears in the Google Snack Pack at the top of page 1.