Why Syndicating and Posting Duplicate Reviews is Bad

Question #1:
Does Reputation Builder Syndicate or automatically publish reviews on Social Media and major Review Sites?

- AND / OR -

After a customer leaves positive feedback, can Reputation Builder offer a way to copy/paste the review to Social Media and major Review Sites by the customer.

Answer #1:

Reputation Builder does not syndicate reviews to third party sites for the simple reason of it likely being counted as "Duplicate Content".

Giving the customer the option to copy/paste the content will have the same result.

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 Reputation Builder 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 Reputation Builder pull existing reviews from Google or Yelp to be displayed on my website?

Answer #2:

In the "old" days the review content and text was not indexed the same way as it in today using Schema.org's Review format etc. Therefore it was "ok" to pull in those reviews to your site.

Today however doing so would create duplicate content, and if Google despises one thing then it is exactly that - Duplicate Content : )

Plus doing so would violate the terms and conditions of most review sites. We therefore highly recommend to only add unique reviews and testimonials onto your website that do not exist elsewhere.

What can I do to encourage "happy" customers to leave Reviews on major sites?

Reputation Builder 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 Reputation Builder.

For more tips on how to encourage Online Reviews please visit this post.