@darrenshawseo

Google just made one of the most significant changes to its review system in years. This is gonna have a major impact on every business in the world, and business owners need to know about this. Users can now leave a review under a pseudonym instead of displaying the real name.

Ali Margeson just published the ultimate guide with everything you need to know, and here are the highlights.

Yes, this means that businesses are gonna get more negative reviews. There's research on what is called the online disinhibition effect. Basically, when people are anonymous online, they tend to be meaner and more comfortable saying things that they might not say if they have to show their name.

So that could definitely lead to more negative reviews.

People are also worried that this is going to result in more fake review spam, but I don't necessarily think that's going to happen. You see, this is just changing the display name. Every review left is still tied to a full Google account.

All of Google's protections for fake review fighting are still in place.

They still have the history of that account, the activity of that account, the location. They still know the user behind that account. So it's not exactly the same thing as just strictly anonymous reviews.

But there's good news here as well.

Basically, this will mean more positive reviews. Also, a lot of people are concerned about privacy. They don't want to put their name on the Internet.

So if you can use a display name instead, that can actually help you get more reviews on your business.

This is particularly valuable in sensitive industries like criminal law, drug rehab, therapists, all of these categories where people aren't comfortable putting their name to their reviews online, they can now do so comfortably. So here's what every business owner needs to do. 1, you should update your review request template so it tells people that they can change their display name when they leave a review.

You could add a line at the bottom of the template that says something like, want to leave a review without showing your full name online?

You can update your display name here and then link to Google documentation on it. And 2, you should start monitoring and downloading all of your reviews. Whitespark has a $1 per month local platform that allow you to export all of your reviews.

You should do that on a regular basis because that'll allow you to identify when reviews go missing or when people change their name on their reviews.

So send this video to a business owner that you know they need to know about this. And make sure you check out Ali's post by Googling White Spark blog that has all the details and everything else that you need to know about this new feature from Google.