Syndication to third party review sites was popular several years ago before the primary consumer review sites had consolidated around the major review sites.
Now most sites which accept syndicated reviews (Google, Yelp, Facebook etc state in their Terms of Service that they do not) have such a narrow reach that syndicating reviews to them offers little value as they are unlikely to be seen by many.
We syndicate your review to the most important place- YOUR website. There it adds additional searchable content, adds rich snippet data that the search engines love and increases the chances that your site will not just be found but will stand out from the competitors when it is.
Happy customers will be shown a list of online review links of your choice and can leave you an online review after providing you with feedback.
Question #1:
Does ReviewAbility Syndicate or automatically publish reviews on Social Media and major Review Sites?
– AND / OR –
After a customer leaves positive feedback, can ReviewAbility offer a way to copy/paste the review to Social Media and major Review Sites by the customer.
Answer #1:
ReviewAbility does not syndicate reviews to third party sites for the simple reason of it likely being counted as “Duplicate Content”.
ReviewAbility does make it easy however for a happy customer to leave an online review!
Google defines “Duplicate Content” as:
“Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”
This is especially important since ReviewAbility used a proprietary method to dynamically display reviews on your website as “Original Content of your website” that will be indexed by search engines as content on your site. In addition the reviews are using the Schema.org Review format.
Question #2:
Can ReviewAbility pull existing reviews from Google or Yelp to be displayed on my website?
Answer #2:
Schema.org Reviews are meant to be “original content” and re-showing reviews from elsewhere violates Google’s guidelines and creates duplicate content.
Review sites do not hold the copyright to reviews – the user does. (To avoid liability). To show a review left on a third-party site you must seek the consumers (who left the review) written approval to avoid copyright violations. Marking them up in schema however is not appropriate as mentioned above.
ReviewAbility takes a different approach. We find that by asking every customer for feedback you can get plenty of additional unique, original reviews for your website AND for other sites as well. Every customer that uses ReviewAbility has generated numerous original reviews that can legitimately be shown using rich snippets in your websites.
Happy Customers will also be given the option to leave reviews on Third-party sites of your choice. A tutorial on how to set those up can be found here.
What can I do to encourage “happy” customers to leave Reviews on major sites?
ReviewAbility does offer various options for encouraging customers to leave unique and authentic reviews on Social Media and Review Sites, such as including review links in the “Thank You” email that goes out to customers that left positive feedback.
Another popular choice is the option to ask for “Rating Only” in the initial feedback request email, which will assure that only “happy” customers see your Social Links, and since the customer has not yet left a written testimonial or review, they are more likely to do so on the social and review links that you can choose and pre-determine within ReviewAbility.
For more tips on how to encourage Online Reviews please visit this post.