Issues with copying online forum reviews on own website

[jannkuzel]

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.

[eTundra]

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.

[jannkuzel]

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?

[eTundra]

Oh OK that makes sense - it will be a worthy investment!

As far as copying over content, here are my thoughts:

1. 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.
2. 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.

[jannkuzel]

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.