Recommend Copy and Pasting Reviews Onto Your Website?

[Samson Simpson]

If you were to copy reviews from a place like Yelp or another large review website, would you expect this to help or hurt in anyway?

It doesn't concern me much from a duplicate content standpoint because they would either be a very small % of homepage text, or on their own testimonial-like page so Im not afraid about google starting to ignore pages because of this. More just curious if you would see an SEO benefit at all to this or perhaps I am missing something that you localers know about which I do not.

Owner is more interested in just getting some more credibility with visitors by doing something like this.

Thanks

 

[Howell]

We've done some of this, but not for an SEO benefit. We show good reviews as a way to help instill trust for the potential client.

What we're going to be testing soon is the integration of schema.org review stars, to show up in the SERPS (hopefully to get better click through rates).

Review - schema.org

 

[Ben Bowen]

I cut and paste Yelp reviews that are filtered, since those pages are not indexed.

Other reviews I embed, either using a widget provided by the site (Houzz), or I cut and paste them to G+ and then embed the post.

I err on the side of caution when it comes to duplicate content.

 

[Kristen]

If reviews are posted elsewhere on the web, we will recreate the reviews as images and embed them on the website. Same thing with Thank You cards.

For email testimonials/positive customer feedback, we'll grab a screenshot of the email, hide private info like email addresses and embed the whole image as a graphic on the website to increase the legitimacy of the review, so it's not a cut and paste scenario of just text.

 

[Andy]

>I cut and paste Yelp reviews that are filtered, since those pages are not indexed.

I would not be too sure about that. It seems that although the reviews may be hidden from the business page, they are still visible on the user?s own page - and they are getting indexed by google (see below link)

What To Do About a Filtered Yelp Review | Navolutions

 

[Ben Bowen]

Interesting Andy- I couldn't duplicate that with my filtered reviews however.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

We do what Kristen does. We just put them in an image.

 

[dharam chaudhari]

You can, Just make sure it's image format. actually you can share that image on various image sharing sites as well as for branding too.

 

[sequenantial]

I think just to be safe, you might want to link (can no follow) to the pages that the reviews are coming from such as yelp as the reference.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I wrote an article on this recently about how to embed reviews from Facebook and Google onto your website using their embedding tools. This way they shouldn't get filtered as duplicate content since you are referring back to the source.

Make the Most out of Your Facebook & Google Plus Reviews | Imprezzio Marketing

I think this option is better than using an image since it will be easier to have it resize for different screen sizes.

 

[Robert Ramirez]

I cut and paste Yelp reviews that are filtered, since those pages are not indexed.

I'm noticing that some of those reviews are getting indexed through the users profile page. It's not a 100% at this point, but it appears to be happening more and more.

As others have mentioned, you can use images to display review content. Attribution to the original source is always advisable.

RE: republishing filtered reviews, I forget where I read it, but I believe Yelp recommends that you contact the reviewer personally for permission to republish their review. Quite a bit of trouble to go through - and in fact, if you are going to go through that effort, you may as well try to re-engage the customer to spend time on their Yelp account to get the review unfiltered.

To answer the original question in the thread, I don't think republishing reviews would offer any kind of SEO benefit. The duplicate content issues are legitimate, but again, the worst you are looking at if you keep this to one page is having that page filtered from Google search results. You can even noindex it if you are really worried about the duplicate content issues.