Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it against google guidelines to use third party review sites as well as have reviews on my site marked up with schema?
-
So, i look after a site for my family business. We have teamed up with the third party site TrustPilot because we like the way it enables us to send out reviews to our customers directly from our system. It's been going great and some of the reviews have been brilliant.
I have used a couple of these reviews on our site and marked them up with:
REVIEW CONTENT
We work in the service industry and so one of the problems we have found is that getting our customers to actually go online and leave a review. They normally just leave their comments on a job sheet that the workers have signed when they leave. So I have created a page on our site where we post some of the reviews the guys receive too. I have used the following:
REVIEW TITLE
REVIEW
Written by: CUSTOMER NAME
Type of Service:House Removal
Date published: DATE PUBLISHED
10 / 10 stars
I was just wondering I was told that this could be against googles guidelines and as i've seen a bit of a drop in our rankings in the last week or so i'm a little concerned. Is this getting me penalised? Should I not use my
reviews referencing the ones on trust pilot and should i not have my own reviews page with rich snippets?
-
Personally I would doubt that you would get penalised for it especially as these are genuine reviews. We use a similar tactic here and post individual user reviews gathered locally on site and then also feature aggregate review for an overall score located on a third party site.
As you are using TrustPilot which is a Google Partner for reviews, I would imagine this will only benefit you in the long run, but check with them about featuring their logos on your site. Some review sites are quite particular about how you display their logo/artwork and may also require a link back Due to TrustPilot being a Google Partner, you also have the added benefit of having star ratings in any Google Adwords activity you may be doing, thus helping to further increase their positive impact on CTA's and conversions when landing.
Hope that helps. As per Robert, just make sure you get your schema correct to ensure accurate portrayal of the review data so it is picked up.
Finally, there is a chance that you will get your review snippet on Google, but this is not guaranteed even if your schema markup 100% correct.
Good luck
Tim
-
Don't know what the "digital marketing" person was thinking, but no you won't get penalized.
If you are hoping to get an aggregate review snippet, make sure the schema is correct. You are showing a rating scale of 10 and Trust Pilot uses 5 stars (as do most). Here is the markup from a markup generator where product is 'example product' scale is 5 and schema is markup. I arbitrarily used 4.8 as the aggregated rating (as if you had 10 reviews, eight of which are 5 and two are 4 totaling 48).
example product
Rated 4.8/5 based on 10 reviewsAgain, be careful of copyrights when moving the actual review content.
Best
-
Hey Robert,
Thanks for getting back to me. Sorry just to clarify, the trust pilot reviews i display are purely aesthetic i haven't marked them up with schema. I've just got a couple of reviews and then put the little widget next to them to show our ranking.
I then have a separate 'customer reviews' page where i list the reviews sent back to us via our feedback forms. I've also stated that all reviews can be verified with signed documents should anyone wish to see them for any reason. It's these reviews i've marked up with schema which i'm hoping will, when enough are uploaded mean i can get the google stars below our name?
Do you think i'll be penalised for this? Someone i know in digital marketing told me i would but i can't see why?
-
BearPaw,
There is nothing in the guidelines about showing reviews on your site that you have brought in from other sites. What I would caution against is that if you are going to do this, you need to be fully disclosed on the site. If you are only bringing in the best reviews, I would certainly create some sort of disclaimer to say some reviews are left off. Also, on your schema you are showing a rating value of 1 -10 and Trust Pilot uses a 1-5 system.
I do not know if TrustPilot has a copyright on their reviews but if they do you will be violating that and probably their user agreement. Remember, they make money handling the reviews for you and being the purveyor of review rankings. I am not sure I would use the person schema on the reviews, but I can't think of a reason not to either. Another issue around that is even if they left the review for your product, be careful with posting something and attributing it without permission.
So, those are more cautionary items than rules.
Best
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is my financial services site being flagged as gambling
Watchguard and Websense/Forecepoint are flagging my financial services site gambling...how can I prevent that from happening. https://fwag.com/
Web Design | Sep 6, 2023, 9:55 AM | AdsposureDev0 -
Site Migration due to Corporate Acquisition
Hey everyone, Wanted to check-in on something that I've been thinking way too much about lately. I'll do my best to provide background, but due to some poor planning, it is rather confusing to wrap your head around. There are currently three companies involved, Holding Corp (H Corp) and two operating companies, both in the same vertical but one B2B and the other is B2C. B2C corp has been pushed down the line and we're focusing primarily on H Corp and B2B brand. Due to an acquisition of H Corp and all of it's holdings, things are getting shuffled and Ive been brought in to ensure things are done correctly. What's bizarre is H Corp and it's web property are the dominant authority in SERPs for the B2B brand. As in B2B brand loses on brand searches to H Corp, let alone any product/service related terms. As such, they want to effectively migrate all related content from H Corp site to B2B brand site and handover authority as effectively as possible. Summary: Domain Migration from H Corp site to B2B Brand site. Ive done a few migrations in my past and been brought in to recover a few post-launch so I have decent experience and a trusted process. One of my primary objectives initially is change as little as possible with content, url structure (outside the root) etc so 301s are easy but also so it doesn't look like we're trying to play any games. Here's the thing, the URL structure for H Corp is downright bad from both a UX perspective and a general organizational perspective. So Im feeling conflicted and wanted to get a few other opinions. Here are my two paths as I see and Id love opinions on both: stick with a similar URL structure to H Corp through the migration (my normal process) but deviate from pretty much every best practice for structuring URLs with keywords, common sense and logic. Pro: follow my process (which has always worked in the past) Con: don't implement SEO/On-page best practices at this stage and wait for the site redesign to implement best practices (more work) Implement new URL structure now and deviate from my trusted process. Do you see a third option? Am I overthinking it? Other important details: B2B brand is under-going a site redesign, mostly aesthetic but their a big corporation and will likely take 6-9 months to get up. Any input greatly appreciated. Cheers, Brent
Web Design | May 30, 2019, 4:04 AM | pastcatch1 -
Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?
all the page titles in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names. Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized? If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title? If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct? My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true? Thanks mozzers!
Web Design | May 14, 2014, 2:49 PM | Ron100 -
Does Google count the domain name in its 115-character "ideal" URL length?
I've been following various threads having to do with URL length and Google's happiness therewith and have yet to find an answer to the question posed in the title. Some answers and discussions have come close, but none I've found have addressed this with any specificity. Here are four hypothetical URLs of varying lengths and configurations: EXAMPLE ONE:
Web Design | May 24, 2013, 11:50 AM | RScime25
my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (115 characters) EXAMPLE TWO: sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (126 characters) EXAMPLE THREE: www.sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (130 characters) EXAMPLE FOUR: http://www.sample.com/my-big-widgets-are-the-best-widgets-in-the-world-and-come-in-many-vibrant-and-unique-colors-and-configurations.html (137 characters) Assuming the examples contain appropriate keywords and are linked to appropriate anchor text (etc.,) how would Google look upon each? All I've been able to garner thus far is that URLs should be as short as possible while still containing and contextualizing keywords. I have 500+ URLs to review for the company I work for and could use some guidance; yes, I know I should test, but testing is problematical to the extreme; I look to the collective/accumulated wisdom of the MOZVerse for help. Thanks.1 -
Does Google penalize duplicate website design?
Hello, We are very close to launching five new websites, all in the same business sector. Because we would like to keep our brand intact, we are looking to use the same design on all five websites. My question is, will Google penalize the sites if they have the same design? Thank you! Best regards,
Web Design | Mar 21, 2013, 11:20 AM | Tiberiu
Tiberiu0 -
Google also indexed trailing slash version - PLEASE HELP
Hi Guys, We redesigned the website and somehow our canonical extension decided to add a trailing slash to all URLs. Previously our canonical URLs didn't have a trailing slash. During the redesign we haven't changed the URLs. They remained same but we have now two versions indexed. One with trailing slash one without. I've now fixed the issue and removed the the trailing slash from canonical URLs. Is this the correct way of fixing it? Will our rankings be effected in a negative way? Is there anything else I need to do. The website went live last Tuesday. Thanks
Web Design | Jul 21, 2012, 9:28 AM | Jvalops0 -
Site Activity, SEO, and behind login
I have a site that provides online education and as such, most of the user activity happens behind a login. This has me thinking about potential SEO impacts with a few questions that maybe someone could lend some light on: How important is activity (above just search activity) to the search engines Would it help to enter these pages, even though they're behind a login, into GA as we have with the front-end of the site Does a subdomain make a difference (right now we implement the course as a subdomain of the main site Lastly, as I was looking at compete.com, I am wondering how they get these use statistics?
Web Design | May 11, 2012, 6:29 PM | uwaim20120 -
Mobile Site Pages: Word Count Help
Hi there I am doing a mobile website for a client and they asked me what the dieal word count would be per page. They are SEO conciosu but we are not doing SEO on this site. I would just like to know a general rule of thumb. Regards Stef
Web Design | Jan 13, 2012, 1:22 AM | stefanok0