Reviews on search engines has become more popular then ever. The Bing search engine is now displaying Yelp reviews of restaurants or businesses when you search "(business name) reviews." This will make businesses more concerned then ever that their reviews must be good or they could lose business.
As you can see from the picture below that the business or restaurant will desplay in the top spot of the search list. Below it is the overall Yelp review score with 3 customers individual review feed back. you can sort the reviews results look by "Favorable" or "Critical."
You will also notice that the Yelp results and reviews are removed from the knowledge panel on the right hand side. This is the opposite of what the Google's knowledge panel does. Google gives the overall review rating and 3 individual reviews from Google places in their knowledge panel as you can see from the screen shot below.
Now if a restaurant has multiple locations, Bing has a different look to the results. It chooses the more popular business location and shows the top 3 Yelp reviews. The main difference is it highlights a number of reviews for other locations in a numbered list. If you click on the business in the number list it will expand with 3 of the top Yelp reviews.
They also show for local stores as well.
The reason why we are seeing Yelp reviews on the Bing search is because Yelp has a special relationship with Bing and Yahoo. Google is the opposite and actually tries to penalize Yelp in their search engines to promote their own Google Places reviews. Bing started this relationship with Yelp in 2012 and previously they just hosted Yelp reviews in the Knowledge Panel. Now, they are showcasing their relationship with Yelp on their organic search, which is something we have not seen before.
Yahoo has a relationship with Bing and Yelp also but they are not displaying Yelp in their search results. Bing is displaying reviews more then Google and Yahoo combined hoping that this might be a game changer for their local search.
Businesses are going to be watching their reviews a lot closer with this Bing local search update. This will mean more people are going to buy reviews to keep the positive reviews on top and their overall rating high. There is no doubt in my mind that we will start seeing stricter regulations for fake reviews and spammy reviews for all search engines in the near future.
Bing has also added similar search results for TripAdvisor reviews on hotels and attraction searches.Overall, this is a good move by Yelp and will make them more valuable then they already are. Yelp has been dealing with traffic and visitor drop offs on their website and this should increase their market share.