How to add customer testimonials from customers from each city, encoded in Schema review markup.

[jasonprice]

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[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

It will be really hard to do this for testimonials (of course the markup integration itself is quite easy) as you don't have a certain grade for the testimonial. This fast I can't seem to find the link itself but I think John Mueller recently mentioned that for testimonials you shouldn't implement the review markup as they're looking for more data really around a product in the form of metrics.

[jasonprice]

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[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jason!

Good question. I wrote the article in question last spring, and the John Mu remarks from a couple of weeks ago to which Martjin is referring can be read in full here:

http://www.brafton.com/news/avoid-seo-hit-differentiating-reviews-testimonials

Now, I must confess, I am still thinking my way through the nuances of John's comments about this and the way in which they represent Google's stance. I'm actually going to come back to this thread after I talk this over with colleagues, as i have been thinking about this myself. I'll return to this thread, and I'm glad you've raised this here.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jason!

Popping back by this thread after digging deeper into this issue, which is a controversial one. At the time I wrote the above Moz Blog post you read, Google had never made any public differentiation between testimonial and reviews. Now, with John Mu's comment, we are hearing something brand new about this, and there is debate about how to interpret this. For example, what John is citing appears to be the fact that Google views testimonials as filtered sentiment (controlled by the business owner) vs. the unfiltered sentiment of 3rd party reviews. So, a question is, if you published unfiltered testimonials on your website, would Google be okay with them being marked up in Schema? I can't answer that question, but there is a really good discussion of this going on at Linda Buquet's Local Search Forum. Especially check out David Deering's thoughtful comments:

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/26385-say-what-google-says-dont-add-review-markup-your-customer-reviews.html

It's going to be up to each Local SEO how they want to interpret this. As for me, I agree with David's take on this at this point and we'll see where the chips fall with this in future.

[jasonprice]

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