Re-using Online Reviews?

[clearlyseo]

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[MiriamEllis]

Hi Joshua,

Great questions, and you have some good ideas going here. We have a page here in the Moz Local Learning Center that links to the guidelines of some of the major review platforms, so that should help you identify, one by one, the permissions of each platform: https://moz.com/learn/local/understanding-review-guidelines

I like your idea of anthology posts featuring your best reviews, and would say that if you are anxious about actually plugging those into the post (based on guidelines), you could at least link to them. Not as impressive a presentation, though.

Check out Phil Rozek's list of review widgets and badges you could embed for some more visual interest/impact: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2014/10/14/ultimate-list-of-review-widgets-and-badges-for-your-local-business-website/#comment-506826

I'd like to be able to promise that Google will assume you are abiding by their guidelines in terms of getting customer permission, and I think you'll be pretty safe if you do so, but I just can't guarantee it. Nobody but Google knows how they decide to investigate/judge things like this on an individual website. It's likely low on their scale of priorities, so, I wouldn't feel too concerned that they'd assume you're violating their guidelines.

Regarding the map idea, are you talking about creating a custom Google map? Something else?

[dohertyjf]

Woof, this one is tough. It's definitely a legal minefield when you are dealing with sites like Yelp or Google. I don't know the ins-and-outs of all of those platforms and their specific rules around re-using reviews, but I'd bet that they wouldn't be happy about it.

If you have reviews somewhere (eg your own site) and want to use them on another site, I'd say that it's best practice to reach out to those people and see if they are ok with that. It's just good business and who knows - maybe they'll give you another unique one!

From a pure SEO point of view, it is technically "duplicate content" but that terms has been used so generally that I should explain myself. When we talk about "duplicate content" in the SEO space, it means one of two things:

• Massive issues on a site with URLs harming each other and keeping the site from ranking for head terms
• Content placed on other sites for the purposes of driving links back, with no canonical or link back to the original

While I am not a huge fan of replicating reviews, there are definitely business reasons for doing it. I don't really think about the "duplicate content" effects of duplicating reviews onto other platforms, as long as they're adding value.

Hope that helps somewhat.

[clearlyseo]

Thanks for weighing-in Miriam and John! Valuable stuff.

For the G Maps, yes, for service companies we link into their CRMs to create custom embeddable maps of past work in and around their service area. With Google map API's the sky's pretty much the limit. I've seen some companies include a customer's review (from wherever it was published) right there on that customer's map pin. Pretty nifty, assuming it's on the up and up.

[clearlyseo]

Thanks for specifying the duplicate content considerations here John. I think we've envisioned all of the above re-uses containing links and explicit reference to the original site and review.

Having not yet read each site's stipulations, it seems to me like they'd appreciate the free publicity and resulting backlinks to their sites. We'd even envisioned having branded site icons next to each re-used/referenced review so users can click directly to said review and read others on the original site.

I'm curious to explore the stipulations to see if there's expressed reasoning for not liking the practice.