Google has rolled out a new update to its reviews policy to help push back on businesses soliciting reviews. They have added that reviews containing the mentions of staff member's name and information are no longer allowed. Both of these instances will result in those reviews being reviewed and removed by Google.

This update can be found under the Prohibited Content Section of the user generated review policy. Here are the lines added:

• Merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews
• Merchants requesting that staff solicit reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member.
  

As Google is looking to supercharge local search results with their "Ask Maps" feature, they are cracking down on review content that they believe could unfavorably weigh results if the information is not organic. Google’s sentiment analysis tools are now trained to detect these artificial patterns in real-time, so please coordinate with your team to ensure that no current review polices in place impact your local search prescence.

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