Publishing testimonials on your site that are from your Google + (or other review sites page)
-
Ive got a site with some good Google + Reviews and some other good reviews on other sites that id like to be able to publish on a testimonials page on our website, but im worried about being penalised for duplicate content. Any idea of the best way to get these reviews on to our website, i was thinking about placing the text in as an image, but id prefer to do something semantic if at all possible.
(I know that some review sites have javascript widgets you can use to pull in your reviews but for most of the sites we are reviewed on they dont)
-
Hi Sam!
It might be helpful to start with a little clarification here - in Local SEO, the term 'testimonials' tends to indicate direct-to-business owner content while the term 'reviews' typically indicates content that exists on a third party platform. In researching this topic, it would likely be better to search for 'reviews' rather than 'testimonials' as you are talking about third party reviews.
Mike Blumenthal wrote a great little post about this earlier this year:
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/04/24/using-google-reviews-on-your-website/
Hope it helps!
-
I would agree with everyone here that duplicate content isn't really an issue here. And it's really not the concern it once was. I personally would take a screen shot though, just to show where the original is for your audience. I also heard somewhere that you can't republish Yelp testimonials elsewhere, or maybe it was Google+, and have them still featured on the original source. So you may want to double check the rules around testimonials for those two sites.
-
If you're really worried about content duplication, I would do as you suggest, placing them as an image. Personally, I wouldn't lose sleep at night if I copied and pasted some reviews from my G+ Local.
(Former?) Google employee, Matt Cutts once posted a video claiming that duplicate content won't hurt you unless it's spammy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi-wkEeOKxM&feature=youtu.be
If you're still on the fence, what I would also suggest is to try asking the same question at Google's Webmaster Central Help Forum. I think you'd get a fairly definitive answer possibly from a Google employee like John Mueller.
-
Differently from (as an example) facebook, google + API doesn't provide a mean of extracting customer reviews. So programmatically you can't, given you rule out scraping them.
Manually you can do whatever you want.
As for content duplication, is a risk, but there's no such thing as content duplication penalization, when facing duplicate content google just make a choice, indexing one or another.
And to have google consider your content duplicate, you really need to copy everything, and have you page share the vast majority of the html with another page.
-
Having a testimonials page on your website is a great idea. It shows the clients going to your website that you are a good provider. I would think you could just place "Review from Google+" or "Review from Yelp" at the bottom of a comment.
Here is our testimonial page: http://www.essentialpest.com/testimonials/
We don't place reviews from other websites. The testimonials we have posted came from emails, letters, etc. - However, I would think that if you linked the word "Google+" from "Review from Google+" with a link to that review, it would just be proof that review does exist.
This may be useful to you. http://moz.com/blog/getting-reviews-the-right-way-for-local-businesses
Good luck!
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
-
Experience Getting Google Reviews Restored?
Does anyone have any experience or know anyone with experience getting google reviews restored? We have no technical issues with our Google business pages/locations, but for some reason, they deleted some of our recent reviews. These reviews were not at our location or review station or anything like that. A couple of the profiles were very new accounts, and a couple of the users posted reviews for a few locations, however, they were legitimate reviews that they did on their own. I was hoping someone had an idea of what to do to appeal to Google or if there was a form to fill out to get our reviews restored. Thanks, Ruben
Reviews and Ratings | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Should Every GMB Page Have it's own email address?
Just spent 2.5 hours on the phone with Google. I created dozens of GMB pages for clients using my email address. Now I am discovering that this is not the right way of doing this. Each business owner should create a GMB account with her own email address. Then I can be added as a manager of that GMB account. Question:
Reviews and Ratings | | aj613
Now that I have dozens of GMB accounts under my email account, is it worth it to create a new email address for each client and associate it with the new email address? I think the best thing would be to have each client do it herself, but I'm not sure it's worth the headache of walking each one through it. What do you think?0 -
Reviews and Google - whats their relationship?
Hi there, I am trying to do some research in the field of reviews, I have set up successful review systems for local stores, but once I get to businesses that want to get reviews for their products or not a local business I cant get it straight. What should I do, What should I avoid at all costs etc., What are the basic guidelines and advice from Google to get reviews? Please give me advice and resources to anything that would be helpful with this topic and the topics listed below What are Google restrictions and requirements for reviews in a local business and a national business? Schema markup for reviews. Product reviews vs company/store reviews Thanks I really appreciate your time and help
Reviews and Ratings | | Ruchy1 -
Reviews and Propogating
Hi, I am wondering about the best way to ask a customer for reviews. I've read in articles back in 2016 that Google my places reviews will often show reviews from facebook page if they are linked together appropriately. Is this still true? Does anyone know additionally of other sites that do this ?
Reviews and Ratings | | therealtechs0 -
Google's knowledge graph carousel
Hi all, my business is on Google's knowledge graph carousel but it hasn't sourced any of the images I've provided. I've set up a G+ & YouTube account. I've added images to our wiki page and added photos to Google for our business, but to no avail. Any ideas? Cheers all.
Reviews and Ratings | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
Local Reviews.
Hi I was wondering if someone can tell me if I understand this correctly or at least my observation has been right? Does Yelp pick up the reviews left of Google and post it on yelp, if you are using the same gmail to log in to both your yelp and google account?
Reviews and Ratings | | LittleDog0 -
How useful is Google Plus to a business?
Is Google Plus really very beneficial to a business, as our experience is that this is where difficult customers or even competitors can write bad reviews?
Reviews and Ratings | | CostumeD1 -
Wondering best ways to optimize for google maps/local listing
I'm wondering if there is any strategy to optimize a client to show up in the local listings. I assume a lot of this is tied to Google + / Google Places for Business. Is it possible to have a company show up in the local listings over a certain geographic area even if they are not technically addressed in that area? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks, Dan H.
Reviews and Ratings | | higherimages0