3rd Party Approved Reviews - Widget or API Feed - Any thoughts ?
-
Hi Mozzers,
We use a google approved 3rd party review company to collect reviews for our branches and now also for our products( this is about to be implemented).
We currently use one of their widgets on our site (its javascript) to show the reviews. I don't think google can read this and I don't think we currently, therefore, get any direct seo benefit from it.
My questions are as follows :
- I obviously want to get any SEO benefit from any review text which customers leave but as the data itself is housed on the review site with a widget on my site pointing to it,should I use an API feed as opposed to a widget. If google can read the review text on my page - then surely i should some benefit from it even though, it could technically be classed as duplicate content
what are peoples thoughts ? .
thanks
Pete
-
"The only benefit is trust , increase CTR etc and obviously reviews markup."
This is a huge benefit though. It's abut users at the end of the day and having those stars showing in the serps and having the reviews scrolling on your site (using a widget) has helped me enormously with CTR. It's one of those where you need to think less about the technical SEO stuff and more about how having the reviews there will increase the CTR and conversion rates. It also helps time on site - all MASSIVE ranking signals.
If I said to you that a piece of technical wizzardry could increase CTR, TOS and conversions then you'd learn how to do it and implement it like immediately. Well that's what reviews do. So i'd not worry about marking them up or just use a wordpress widget and get them on there. I'm not massively technical but we do have 500 5* reviews with a widget on every page of the site and are in the top 3 for most non-branded searches because of our CTR. Also google says they want to eventually live in a world without markup when the algo gets smarter so it's all going to be a moot point.
Sorry If i've missed the technical nuances of this but we're doing super well just having the nice comments up there on the site (which is more than lots of your competitors have)
-
I think that a good options is create a plugin
So you can ask to your clients to give you a review in your site but using a third party API, so the first Idea is use the Google Business Review API.to show off your Google My Business Reviews rating in stars, thumbs or squares.
For Local SEO I think is the best option and you will not share your DA with nobody.
-
Do the reviews appear anywhere else on the web? Are people leaving reviews on the reviewer's site, and they're visible there, and then you're pulling them in via this widget? Or are they only visible on your site, through the widget?
If the reviews are elsewhere on the web (for example on a review site such as Yelp or Angie's List), Google is going to understand that that content belongs on that site. Pulling it in via this widget probably won't send much in the way of a unique content signal; it's unlikely that it would be seen as duplicate content, though, as long as the page it appears on also has its own unique content. Appearing through the widget also means you likely won't be able to mark up the reviews using schema.org.
If they appear somewhere else, and Google can easily associate those reviews with your product, you'd probably be better served having a function on your own website where people can review your products there. Then, let those reviews live on your site, and the third-party reviews stay on the third-party reviewer site.
-
Yes, that's what I thought, My only concern with using a widget though is the data is "owned" by the review company so whilst I'm displaying the rewiew on my site, I am not getting any SEO benefit in terms of unique content whats' so ever.
The only benefit is trust , increase CTR etc and obviously reviews markup.
I am wondering if it's better to write something in addition to this 3rd party review software we use so customers can write the reviews and then the pages will benefit from the unique content and freshness..
Otherwise , All I'm really doing is having duplicate content
thanks
Peter
-
Not because, the widget will point the source of the content
(if you add a google my business widget with the reviews of your clients)
the tag of the widget will tells google where the information is coming from.
At leasrt is my expriencie integrating widget from yelp, and google my business
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
-
Beware of Fishy 4-Star Reviews
Hello to all our folks who market local businesses! I came across something this week that I felt was important enough to share. Hopefully, if you're a Moz blog reader or a Moz Local customer, you're already well aware of the importance of monitoring your Google My Business reviews on an ongoing basis, responding to them as they come in, whether they're positive or negative. And, you know to be on the lookout for spam reviews. But a strange new form of spam seems to be emerging that might be really easy to overlook at first. We're all familiar with the spammer who leaves you fake 1-star reviews for the purpose of harming your brand. But you might not immediately be suspicious of a 4-star review, or even a string of 4-star reviews until you realize your former 5 star rating has been whittled down by a succession of less-than-perfect, fake reviews. The worst thing, I think, about this tactic, is that it can be overlooked. Jason Brown has captured this phenomenon in his recent post: http://reviewfraud.org/4-star-negative-review-attacks/ and I highly recommend reading it and paying extra attention to any 4-star reviews companies you market may be receiving. I'd suggest, if you find this going on with any of the GMB listings you manage, you report it to Jason so that he can continue to track this activity. He's a Google forum TC, and, perhaps, with enough evidence, he might eventually be able to make a case to Google about this practice.
Reviews and Ratings | | MiriamEllis5 -
PPC: How do we get our reviews into AdWords?
Hi there, I know that Google have sadly discontinued ratings extension in AdWords but does anyone know a get-around for this? If possible, we'd like to show off the good reviews we have from Google My Business' Knowledge Panel in our ads. We're an online product/service so I don't want to link GMB through the location extension if possible (it doesn't make sense for anyone to pay us a visit in real life). Is there a better way of linking our AdWords to our GMB or is there an alternative extension/ AdWords feature we can use to get review ratings in our ad? Thanks 🙂
Reviews and Ratings | | Fubra0 -
3rd Party Reviews - Schema Implementation
Hi, Currently my client displaying Ratings & Reviews from a third-party (TripAdvisor) service and only displaying 5 reviews but not showing "Read More Reviews" button to TripAdvisor page. Now I would like to use Rich Snippet schema markup code on these rating & reviews but below are my few concerns, could you please guide me: 1. Can I use Rich Snippet Schema markup code on widget of TripAdvisor Rating & Review. 2. If I apply schema markup code, Do I need to maintain TripAdvisor link for "Read More reviews". Below are the URLs which contains TripAdvisor rating & reviews after big image: https://goo.gl/DLpDXE https://goo.gl/EHVG7o https://goo.gl/ok6cYp Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Satla
Reviews and Ratings | | TrulyTravel0 -
Query on Product Reviews
Hello Experts, For my Ecommerce site I am using third party review service. Now my query is :- The reviews which is showing on my third party site if same review I can show on my product so will google consider this as duplicate content? Now that product listed on one of the category and that category page before footer section I have section of "Recently Reviewed" section in that section also it is showing same review of that product so is it fine? Will google consider it as duplicate content? Lastly I do have few subcategory pages before footer section I have section of "Recently Reviewed" section in that section also it is showing same review of that product so is it fine? Will google consider it as duplicate content?Note - Image attached of Review section - Which is visible on category and subcategory pages.FYI - This I am doing for two purpose 1) For Visitors purpose so he or she will know reviews about my products 2) As it is customer own written reviews so my pages will get fresh content.Please share your viewsBiKmp
Reviews and Ratings | | wright3350 -
Google crawling item page reviews
Hi Moz community, I've been trying to do some on-site work and noticed that our product pages reviews may not be totally optimized. It used to be that all of the text from the reviews appeared in the actual code of the page, but now none of that text appears, so it may not be getting crawled. The change was most likely released when we had an item page redesign. However, when I Google a review snippet, it does seem to come up, so maybe Google is crawling that data despite it not being SEO optimized. Is this really an issue if the review snippets are showing up in search, there's been a lot of talk that Google is now better at crawling javascript. Thanks
Reviews and Ratings | | znotes0 -
How to address reviews that show up in Google but come from a business's own website?
One of my clients has a competitor who has a fairly poor reputation based on reviews on Google and Yelp. But, this competitor allows people to review them on their own website, and their "4.8" rating based on 250+ "reviews" show up in search engine results. I assume they are using schema markup to encourage that. My question is whether there is anything we can do to report this to Google, or otherwise make sure the general public is not fooled by these reviews?
Reviews and Ratings | | irapasternack2 -
Enabling Rich Snippets for Reviews and Ratings
Hi everybody, Going to install schema AggregateRating code so our website will appear with 5 stars snippet in SERP. Researching other websites and see two main approaches: Site displays all its reviews on the page where the snippet is
Reviews and Ratings | | Ryan_V
http://www.meatheadmovers.com/movers/los-angeles.aspx Site displays only a few reviews on the targeted page, and the rest can be found on the other page, where they marked up with schema as well.
http://www.danielsmoving.com/areas-served/moving-from-arizona-to-los-angeles/
http://www.alexmoving.net/areas-served/los-angeles-movers/ Google shows rich snippet for both in SERP
http://prntscr.com/ak1vcs
http://prntscr.com/ak1vup Though it says here:
"Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page. It should be immediately obvious to users that the page has review or ratings content." Our site has over 300 reviews and I don't want all of them to be in targeted page (home page), of course I prefer to go with option #2 if it's within Google guidelines. is it? What do you guys think?1 -
Embedding reviews on website?
Our company is considering embedding either a live feed of reviews or selected reviews on our website. We're a B2C service business. Our preference would be to embed a live feed of Google+ reviews. I've found conflicting info on whether this will incur a duplicate content penalty from Google. There's a plugin that we could use on our site (built with Wordpress), or we could embed directly from Google+ if it's better for SEO. Thoughts on whether we should embed reviews at all, and if so, the best way to go about it? Thanks!
Reviews and Ratings | | AJ_Tutoring0