Does Google's 3rd Party Reviews Guideline Update make Review Aggregators Obsolete?

[LinkRightMedia]

Good day!We are concerned about Google's updated Guidelines in ratings and reviews, specifically as quoted in the SEO Roundtable: "The new guidelines specifically disallows you from using 3rd party reviews, found on other sites, and marking those up on your site."https://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-reviews-markup-guidelines-22608.htmlThe Guidelines are here https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/reviews#local-business-reviewsWe enlist the use of a 3rd party aggregate for one of our client's (service business). Since, in effect, it is a 3rd party review site, and what the shortcode does is copy reviews from that third party site and mark them up on the client website. What do you guys know about this update, and what are is your take on what the update says and how it relates to a 3rd party review aggregators? Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Good topic! So, the guidelines currently state:

• Ratings must be sourced directly from users.
• Don’t rely on human editors to create, curate or compile ratings information for local businesses. These types of reviews are critic reviews.
• Sites must collect ratings information directly from users and not from other sites.

My question is, is the service you are using publishing your reviews anyplace else but on your website? In other words, are the reviews posted on your site appearing anywhere else?

[LinkRightMedia]

Thanks for your response, Bernadette. This is Jen from Link Right Media actually : ). To clarify, I'm talking more about companies such as Nearby Now that collects reviews, marks them up, and adds them to the client's website.

[becole]

Jason, thanks for posting this. We have been aware of this update, and have taken action accordingly. The reviews that are on certain client websites generally are unique reviews given directly the client, and not posted on third party review sites, so we don't generally have a problem.

The policy that we've taken, even before these guidelines were published, is that we don't duplicate reviews. So, if a review is on a third party site, we generally don't post it or copy it elsewhere. That's duplicate content, and we try to refrain from that.

If you are posting or copying reviews from other websites and putting them on your own site, I recommend refrain from doing that--not only because of Google's updated guidelines.