Publishing testimonials on your site that are from your Google + (or other review sites page)

[Sam-P]

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)

[Essential-Pest]

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!

[max.favilli]

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.

[BBEXNinja]

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.

[Patrick_G]

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.

[MiriamEllis]

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!