Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it against google guidelines to use third party review sites as well as have reviews on my site marked up with schema?
-
So, i look after a site for my family business. We have teamed up with the third party site TrustPilot because we like the way it enables us to send out reviews to our customers directly from our system. It's been going great and some of the reviews have been brilliant.
I have used a couple of these reviews on our site and marked them up with:
REVIEW CONTENT
We work in the service industry and so one of the problems we have found is that getting our customers to actually go online and leave a review. They normally just leave their comments on a job sheet that the workers have signed when they leave. So I have created a page on our site where we post some of the reviews the guys receive too. I have used the following:
REVIEW TITLE
REVIEW
Written by: CUSTOMER NAME
Type of Service:House Removal
Date published: DATE PUBLISHED
10 / 10 stars
I was just wondering I was told that this could be against googles guidelines and as i've seen a bit of a drop in our rankings in the last week or so i'm a little concerned. Is this getting me penalised? Should I not use my
reviews referencing the ones on trust pilot and should i not have my own reviews page with rich snippets?
-
Personally I would doubt that you would get penalised for it especially as these are genuine reviews. We use a similar tactic here and post individual user reviews gathered locally on site and then also feature aggregate review for an overall score located on a third party site.
As you are using TrustPilot which is a Google Partner for reviews, I would imagine this will only benefit you in the long run, but check with them about featuring their logos on your site. Some review sites are quite particular about how you display their logo/artwork and may also require a link back Due to TrustPilot being a Google Partner, you also have the added benefit of having star ratings in any Google Adwords activity you may be doing, thus helping to further increase their positive impact on CTA's and conversions when landing.
Hope that helps. As per Robert, just make sure you get your schema correct to ensure accurate portrayal of the review data so it is picked up.
Finally, there is a chance that you will get your review snippet on Google, but this is not guaranteed even if your schema markup 100% correct.
Good luck
Tim
-
Don't know what the "digital marketing" person was thinking, but no you won't get penalized.
If you are hoping to get an aggregate review snippet, make sure the schema is correct. You are showing a rating scale of 10 and Trust Pilot uses 5 stars (as do most). Here is the markup from a markup generator where product is 'example product' scale is 5 and schema is markup. I arbitrarily used 4.8 as the aggregated rating (as if you had 10 reviews, eight of which are 5 and two are 4 totaling 48).
example product
Rated 4.8/5 based on 10 reviewsAgain, be careful of copyrights when moving the actual review content.
Best
-
Hey Robert,
Thanks for getting back to me. Sorry just to clarify, the trust pilot reviews i display are purely aesthetic i haven't marked them up with schema. I've just got a couple of reviews and then put the little widget next to them to show our ranking.
I then have a separate 'customer reviews' page where i list the reviews sent back to us via our feedback forms. I've also stated that all reviews can be verified with signed documents should anyone wish to see them for any reason. It's these reviews i've marked up with schema which i'm hoping will, when enough are uploaded mean i can get the google stars below our name?
Do you think i'll be penalised for this? Someone i know in digital marketing told me i would but i can't see why?
-
BearPaw,
There is nothing in the guidelines about showing reviews on your site that you have brought in from other sites. What I would caution against is that if you are going to do this, you need to be fully disclosed on the site. If you are only bringing in the best reviews, I would certainly create some sort of disclaimer to say some reviews are left off. Also, on your schema you are showing a rating value of 1 -10 and Trust Pilot uses a 1-5 system.
I do not know if TrustPilot has a copyright on their reviews but if they do you will be violating that and probably their user agreement. Remember, they make money handling the reviews for you and being the purveyor of review rankings. I am not sure I would use the person schema on the reviews, but I can't think of a reason not to either. Another issue around that is even if they left the review for your product, be careful with posting something and attributing it without permission.
So, those are more cautionary items than rules.
Best
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do things like using labels on an element that is not a form input affect how google sees us in regards to accessibility?
Do things like using labels on an element that is not a form input affect how google sees us? It's an accessibility error that our devs have made - using a label element because it looks good, not because it's an actual label on a form field. Just wondering how that affects accessibility in Google's eyes.
Web Design | | GregLB0 -
What’s the best tool to visualize internal link structure and relationships between pages on a single site?
I‘d like to review the internal linking structure on my site. Is there a tool that can visualize the relationships between all of the pages within my site?
Web Design | | QBSEO0 -
Is having a site map page necessary?
Hello all! So I know having a sitemap XML file is important to include in your robots.txt file. I also know it is important to submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing. However, I am wondering if it is beneficial for your site's SEO value to have a sitemap page displayed on your website? Or is this just a redundant action if you have already done the above two actions with your XML sitemap? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Myles920 -
301 Redirect all pictures when moving to a new site?
We have 30,000 pictures on our site. Moz will return 404's on some occasionally, but Google seems to ignore those. Should I 301 redirect all those images when we move to a new site lay-out? Appreciate your views!
Web Design | | Discountvc0 -
Will interlinking using dynamic parameters in url help us in increasing our rankings
Hi, Will interlinking our internal pages using dynamic parameters(like abc.com/property-in-noida?source=footer) help us in increasing our rankings for linked pages OR we should use static urls for interlinking Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Above the Fold Content - Use of large images
Hi All, Our designers have come to the SEO team to ask if have a large image across the top of the page taking up a large majority of the above the fold real estate will impact our SEO. Our initial thoughts are no as long as we have an optimised H1 visibal to the user landing there which informs them what the page is about. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Web Design | | J_Sinclair1 -
Multiple Local Schemas Per Page
I am working on a mid size restaurant groups site. The new site (in development) has a drop down of each of the locations. When you hover over a location in the drop down it shows the businesses info (NAP). Each of the location in the Nav list are using schema.org markup. I think this would be confusing for search robots. Every page has 15 address schemas and individual restaurants pages NAP is at the below all the locations' schema/NAP in the DOM. Have any of you dealt with multiple schemas per page or similar structure?
Web Design | | JoshAM0 -
Mobile Site Pages: Word Count Help
Hi there I am doing a mobile website for a client and they asked me what the dieal word count would be per page. They are SEO conciosu but we are not doing SEO on this site. I would just like to know a general rule of thumb. Regards Stef
Web Design | | stefanok0