Issues with copying online forum reviews on own website
-
Apologies- I asked a similar question the other day but did not word it as clearly as possible.
We are looking at having a text box of 'What customers say' on our product pages using reviews written about us online (to remain factual) and wanted to know if this created any issues relating to search engines finding matching content on two separate websites? Will this have any SEO implications as effectively we are 'plagiarising' the content in the eyes of the bots even though it is just customer opinion of our own products right?
Thanks in advance.
-
1. The reviews are on 3rd party review websites e.g. widgetreview.com
2. We do have a lot of original content on each of the product pages. We were ideally looking to add value to customer experience as we have sorted the original content side already. Permission wise we thought as they are on a public forum we could extract them-but good point we will verify before proceeding.
Any other thoughts are much appreciated.
-
Oh OK that makes sense - it will be a worthy investment!
As far as copying over content, here are my thoughts:
- Are these reviews on competitor websites? If so they would probably take a dim view of you using their reviews. I would make sure I got permission to republish reviews originally posted somewhere else.
- It's still technically duplicate content, but it does add value for your customer, and as long as you have a good amount of other copy on the page (original product description, accompanying how-to article or buying guide) then you're probably OK - in my humble opinion at least.
The main issue is getting permission to pull those reviews from somewhere else. And if the review is the only (or majority) content on these product pages then it's probably not a good idea.
-
Thanks for the prompt response.
We are looking to invest in a review platform in the New Year but in the mean time wanted to utlilise some of the countless reviews found online. Any thoughts about whether copying them over would have any negative implications for us?
-
Why are customers reviewing your products somewhere besides your website in the first place?
I would strongly encourage you to set up a system that allows customers to review your products on your web pages. That way you don't have to go to all the work of finding and copying reviews out on the web and you get a bunch of unique content for your product pages.
I don't know what your budget is like but my company uses BazaarVoice and we have enjoyed using their platform for customer reviews. There are several good User Generated Content services out there that you can plug directly into your website.
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
-
When Somebody Copies your content What should you do?
I wrote an article in 2011 A Brief History of Benjamin Moore Paint on my website ( I am a painting contractor). It is a content creators win; sited as an authoritative article on wikipedia. Benjamin Moore Paint company has copied my content on their own corporate website; a deep page. Is this hurting, helping, or neutral? bX1kFQg,639HqZE bX1kFQg,639HqZE#1
Content Development | | johnshearer0 -
In light of the Interflora advertorials debacle where do you think bloggers stand with regard to product reviews?
I realise the main blame fell on the newspapers for what was essentially cash for links, but a separate part of the PR push was sending flowers to bloggers who then blogged about it. I can see that this could be construed by Google to be a breach of their t&cs, but equally it could be a legitimate action by the blogger if they are giving an honest viewpoint. Is the Google Chrome "satchel" ad being unintentionally misleading? If it's all down to the intention that's a worryingly grey area to be stuck in, what do you think?
Content Development | | Tompt1 -
How do you build authority for your website ? (after Penguin update)
Hi, I was just watching one of the whiteboard Friday videos about the Penguin http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-penguin-update-whiteboard-friday In the video he mentions building authority into your website, My question is how do you build authority ? Is it all about content? Adding quality content to your site on a regular basis or is there anything else we can do to build authority? Regards Jay
Content Development | | Jay_Mistry0 -
A site review please
Hi, first post here so hope i have posted this in the right place. From reading the forums a number of people have asked for site reviews and received some very good feedback so I thought I would jump aboard too. One of my companies, Digital Cow, is based around the world of affiliate marketing and had been doing very well until recent Google changes killed the whole process of making sites based around other people's datafeeds. Through considerable testing we have countered this by increasing the blend of duplicate content and unique, niche related, content. As a result a website we launched about 2 months ago is currently getting around 350 unique hits a day but seems to have stagnated. We know the potential is there for thousands of daily hits on this site and well over 20,000 hits a day on all our websites, but we are having issues with Google at the moment. One week we could be position 10 for a keyword, next position 90, then back to position 10 again and so on. In the last week some 95 keywords moved up the ranking and 62 moved down - we are seoing for a couple of hundred keywords. A small sample of some of these words and our ranking for them are listed below bodysuits women 13
Content Development | | Grumpy_Carl
tumbum 14
bright leggings 18
bright tights 18
bridal hold ups 19
opaque hold ups 20
girls in leggings 21
pretty polly hold up 21
fish net hold ups 22
slimming tights 22
tum bum 26
magic knickers 27
toeless tights 28 and there are many more. The website in question is www.brighttights.com. If anyone could spare a moment to offer their opinion on what they think of the site re seo that would be most welcome. Given it's an ecommerce site there are limits to the content we can add on the homepage. Many thanks Carl0 -
H1 tag in Blank in Wordpress website
Good evening, I have noticed using some h1 checkers, that my primary h1 tag is blank. I manually introduced an h1 with my main keywords, but system recognises as 2 different h1 tags, and therefore it could be harmful for my SEO purposes. I created my wordpress website using Artisteer. Is there any specific way (or plugin) to change this primary h1 tag so it wont appear as blank? My site is www.outletspain.net Thanks in advance Maria Jesus
Content Development | | goperformancelabs0 -
Forum Site: Content Value Post Panda
I run a forum website built on Wordpress. We're about two years old. The theme of the site is a directory of attorneys, with each directory listing having its own blog account on our site. Through this platform, we receive 75-80 blog posts now every month of varying quality from our users. QUESTION: A good number of the blogs published on our site are also published on the attorney's law firm site as well (they're syndicating on our site). Will this hurt our site in light of Panda? A lot of the syndicated content is very well written and insightful. By contrast, Will non-syndicated but average to below average posts hurt our site? The authors almost always link back to their firm site. Would love some feedback on whether we should be happy about the syndicated content or whether we should potentially ban it?
Content Development | | JSOC0 -
My Blog pages are out ranking my main website
My blog was on wordpress.com for over 18mnths and I have just moved it to my domain - rankings are charging as a result - up and down! My current concern is my google.co.uk search position for garden art - my home page http://www.gardenbeet.com has been number 2 for over 12 mnths - now my blog is number 2 http://www.gardenbeet.com/garden_design_blog/garden-art/ this is not the best landing page to generate sales from my shop - any suggestions?
Content Development | | GardenBeet0
