Online Reputation Management Review Software and SEO

[dmc622]

I have a client that has started using an ORM platform to manage their customer Reviews.
Besides last years clean up and crack down of fake reviews by the search engines, has anyone seen any recent negative impacts with using these in terms of SEO?

My one concern that I haven't found much research on is their ability to address Negative reviews before they are published to the web, I would think the Search Engines might take a long look to see if you are trying to block legit negative reviews or is this actually a good faith effort to deal with negative reviews?

The company my client is using is fairly highly rated among its competitors, I'm just doing some DD on the field.

Thoughts?

Thanks in Advance

[goodroi]

It all depends on what you do and how you do it. Caring about reviews and trying to improve your brand image is not a bad thing. Google is becoming more sophisticated in identifying fake reviews and giving more weight to reviews that can be verified but that is more a marketing issue and not exactly a SEO issue IMHO.

A bigger SEO issue are people abusing the review schema. Google tends to be more concerned about that.

[keyplyr]

I host my own review page; allowing reviews to be uploaded and qued until I authorize each one manually. This filters the false reviews from unknown sources. I verify all have been clients.

Why would a company present the means for review if there was even a slight chance of negative coment?

So far they have all been positive so I haven't been ethically challenged one way or the other.

Yelp and Google reviews have also been all 5 out of 5 stars with positive comments. I've never researched to tell if the reviews have had a direct effect on ranking, but there is documentation saying that it does contribute.

[tangor]

@dmc622, glad to have you join us! As to filtering reviews, one has to make the decision on being fair and honest, or filtering out the trash and showing only the good.

I can't say which is better as I do not allow any of that in the first place. Why look for trouble?

YMMV

[dmc622]

Thanks for the responses. the company they are using is fairly popular (just didn't know if it was ok or not to mention brand names here).

Having done this for years, we all know those clients that want that easy way to get rid of negative reviews (even if they are legit) and I always tell them that negative reviews aren't always bad because they make you up your customer service and focus more on getting positive reviews.

A part of me is just thinking that the Search Engines might not see these ORM's as organic review collections and penalize at some point , but for now it seems that if the websites reviews aren't fake then that's the main factor for the search engine's.

Enjoy the day

[keyplyr]

Oh and BTW dmc622 welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]