I want to place reviews from a review site also on my client's website, what's the right way to do that?

[JoostDerks]

My client is doing a good job fitting rooftops out with solar panels. his customers are happy and ready to show this in online reviews. He has a partnership with a review site that gives him new leads, but I just don't want him to lose this valuable reviews just to this one review site..

Here's what i came up with and I love to hear your opinion on this;
I'll copy the content of the solarpanel review site, place it on my client's website in hreview. the contents canonical will be rightfully set to the review site, this way I want to avoid the duplicate content thing, but get the hard earned yellow stars in my client's SERPs. and show the visitors of my clien't s site what a great job he is doing, on his own website..

This is the first time I thought of this solution and I wonder if I'm forgetting something.. Is this solution safe with Google/Bing/Yahoo?

[JoostDerks]

Great stuff Miriam! I'll definitly check it out!

sorry for the deley in replying to you.. I must've mist the email.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Van,

Good question! I'll do my best to answer.

There are two forms of customer feedback:

1. Reviews published on third party sites. This would be reviews customers are publishing directly, themselves, on your company's profiles at places like Google+ Local, Yelp etc. This content belongs to the platform on which it is published. It does not belong to the business owner and should not be republished on his website. Many review platforms have guidelines specifically prohibiting the re-publication of reviews elsewhere.

2. Testimonials published on the company's website. This would be praise the business owner receives from customers via email, filling out a rating card at the time of service or by some other means. In this case, the business owner chooses to publish this content on his website. He can use Schema markup to format these testimonials so that they are ideally crawlable, and may even earn the business stars in Google's SERPs. In this scenario, the business owner owns the content and is free to publish it on a Testimonials page of his website or something similar.

These two forms of user generated content should not be confused. They each exist in a separate 'box' and each have distinct uses.

I'm very excited these days about a recently launched tool, GetFiveStars.com, that makes it super easy for any business to earn both testimonials and reviews, keeping within the guidelines I've mentioned, above. Using GetFiveStars, the process for the business owner will look something like this:

1. At or near time of service, business owner asks customer to use GetFiveStars to leave feedback.

2. The tool is programmed to judge if the feedback is positive, based on a 10 point rating scale. If positive, the feedback is automatically pushed to a designated testimonials page on the website in Schema-encoded format.

3. The customer is then prompted to go further in the process to leave a review on their favorite review site.

4. But, if the initial feedback is not positive, this gives the business owner the chance to go back to the customer to try to rectify the situation, hopefully lessening the chances that the customer will go leave a negative review somewhere on the web.

Really, it a pretty brilliant system. You could replicate this process yourself, but GetFiveStars makes it so easy. I recommend you check it out!