Yelp 3rd Party Reviews

[PetSite]

Our team would like to use Yelps 3rd party integration on our national industry specific platform directory to bolster ratings and reviews until we can organically generate our own.  However, I have  SEO concerns over doing this.  Specifically, we're concerned over the following:

1. Publishing massive amounts of content that has already been published on Yelp.  Worth noting that Yelp's review integration does not hide the the content behind an iFrame.
2. Publishing a backlink providing attribution to Yelp on every one of 40,000 profiles linking back to contextual Yelp profiles. Less worried here as Yelp is reputable and is not likely to hurt ratings.  This is required by Yelp under their TOS.

I think this is a pretty good growth strategy on the part of yelp, but I have worries that this could induce lasting damage on our own SEO that we're working to ramp up.

My questions are:

• Should I have concerns about duplicative content?  Is Yelp big enough for Google to know about this 3rd party integration?
• If I ensure that R&Rs are only posted on pages that have a noindex, nofollow, do we protect ourselves from duplicative content. (ie.  Google bots will not review this content, so we will not have to worry about them finding and attributing duplicative content penalties.)

Please let me know your thoughts.  Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey John,

I hope you will get a reply from someone with hands-on experience with directory development, which I don't have, but here's what I think:

1. Obviously, Yahoo has been using Yelp reviews for some time (http://www.webpronews.com/yelp-reviews-no-longer-appearing-in-yahoo-local-results-2015-08) so there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea.

2. On the other hand, yes, you'd be republishing someone else's content on your own site. So, I can see the cause for concern. That being said, yes, it could be that a different engine like Google is going to recognize that as coming from big Yelp and it might not be a problem, but I wouldn't bank on this if it were my company.

3. Finally, the strategy seems a bit iffy to me, to use Yelp's content if you are trying to build a directory that competes with Yelp for your niche.

4. I think the ideal here for your platform would be to build its own value. After all, you have no control over how a third party vets reviews, filters them, trusts them, etc. Yelp's take on this isn't your take and you may have totally different requirements for assessing the value of UGC.

Again, hope you'll get some further replies on this, but I wanted to at least get the conversation going. I hope folks will disagree with me if they have a totally different take on this. John's question is a very good one!