Google Places API - Submitting reviews

Question

I am researching whether the following is possible and if so how I could go about achieving it.

We collect reviews for businesses from their customers and we’d like to post these reviews to Google places as part of the reviews they have on their.

I was wondering how I would go about getting our website to “push” this data to the Google places website, I’ve done lots of searching on the APIs but have found nothing that says it’s possible or not.

Answer 1

Currently the Google Places API does not have write capability. It only has read capability. Right now only ratings are available, but I suspect reviews might come someday too.

Although you can send check-in signals and fix Places through the API. Hopefully Google will add the ability to send reviews and receive them.

If you're looking to get your content added to Google, you may want to talk to their content partnerships teams http://www.google.com/support/mapcontentpartners/

Since Google's local and maps initiatives are under the same people that would be the place to go.

Answer 2

I too looked into this as it would be of huge value to companies if possible.

My research led me to believe that it is not possible and could possibly violate Google's TOA with negative results for the company's Places page.

Instead, I built a workaround that makes it really easy for companies to collect feedback and get their own customers to submit the reviews: http://dallasmarketingservices.com/survey-local-unveiled-how-online-reviews-affect-your-local-business/

Maybe we will see this in the future though.