If you are a local business who hasn’t focused much effort on getting reviews on your Google My Business page, you will probably be regretting that decision now.  Google has removed the “more reviews” links from local knowledge graphs appearing in the Google search results, in favor of linking to Google reviews alone.

Mike Blumenthal was the first to notice the change.

Here is how Google is currently displaying local businesses in the knowledge graph.

Previously, Google would include links to various online review sites – some higher quality than others – rather than exclusively showing Google reviews.

Here is the same local listing as it showed with the alternative review listings.

There were times when I would notice review sites listed and thought why is that site listed as a review site, especially for sites targeting locations no where near the listing.

For example, this listing for Niagara Falls had multiple review sites listed including a “f1hotelinbarcelona.us” which was essentially a spam site.

In this respect, I can see why Google wanted to clean up the review sites they listed, but this change will definitely hurt smaller businesses whose customers might be familiar enough with Yelp to leave reviews but don’t know about leaving one on Google.  That said, Yelp was one of the reviews sites Google didn’t seem to link to.

Google sent a statement to Blumenthal confirming the change.  “In order to make sure we are showing the most accurate and current content about your business on Google, third party reviews will soon no longer be visible in Google My Business.”

On the positive side, Google will be able to control the quality of these reviews, and attempt to ensure they are legitimate reviews and not spam ones left by either the business owner or competitors.

Unfortunately, I imagine many businesses will be scrambling to figure out how they can encourage more reviews on Google now that the search engine is exclusively linking to their own reviews.