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When Google changed it's review structure earlier this year, it frustratingly dropped the age old 5 stars system.

Google used to let you show any review site stars under your home page in the search results, then dropped these in favour of only displaying Google Places reviews. Then they dropped the 5 star system in favour of a new "zagat" scoring system.

Anyone that has looked at their reviews on Google Places/Local may be stumped with the review system. It now seems even Google has admitted that the new review scoring system is confusing, and have now simplified the review system.

Maybe they will see the light and go back to the good old 5 stars that everyone understands!

Here's more on the story from Search Engine Land
Google Starts To Downplay Zagat Scores; It Should Ditch Them Altogether

We prob delete about 40% of all reviews at the moderation stage, ie obvious self promo, fake, or slander, competitor slagging off the opposition etc. Reviews are prob the biggest overhead we have. It's a fine line, we're not the internet police, but you need to have a fair system, for positive or negative. Most of our time is taken up dealing with negative review complaints.

All reviews have to have a verified email just to get to the moderation stage, but this can be spoofed by throw away addresses. I like the Freeindex method of flagging reviews left by the same IP, but in reality a lot of businesses are uploading customer testimonials they have received. I don't think there is anything wrong with this, which is why we didn't go with the freeindex alert model.

That said, after rebuilding our review system from scratch last year, it's 100% better than before, but theres always room for improvement, and I'm working on a new review system that is designed completely differently but is proving a challenge to get working.

Yup thats pretty much where my thought process went. So the trick is build a non Google reliant business

Quite a few ideas that I would have loved to do with MLS but aren't viable, but hopefully will be able to do in the future.

Hi there, and welcome to the forum.

Planning to launch a business with no advertising budget or marketing plan isn't going to be a fast track to success. If budget is scarce, maybe concentrate on social media, ie build up a targeted twitter and FB following.

As for approaching companies, depends what it is you are actually offering, and what size of company you are targeting. Larger ones will have an inhouse marketing contact, smaller ones you're prob better speaking to the owner direct.

Maybe networking events could be a good one?

lol love it

Here's a nice high level article if you are trying to get an understanding of the Google updates and some of the terminology used.

http://site-reference.com/articles/panda-penguin-and-emd-making-sense-of-the-chaos/"]Panda, Penguin, and EMD