Getting Reviews by Google Users on our Place Profile

[wrockca]

I have a ton of great reviews from our clients, I was wondering if it is possible to post them on Google Reviews section on our Google Places profile without having to have the customer re-post the review.. We feature these in our Testimonials section already.

Thx

[Robert Charlton]

Without having checked this out thoroughly, but based on what I already understand about how Google looks at third party references... I'd say that you should ask the customers to re-post the reviews.

Google is going to want different people with different Google accounts posting from different IPs. Otherwise, reviews would be very easy to spam.

If you're already using the reviews in your site's Testomonial section, I'd suggest also getting unique wording on the newly posted reviews... perhaps even some additional or different customers posting. In its link patents, Google looks at coordinated actions as a sign of manipulation or spam. I know Google ignores or reduces the weighting of links with duplicate descriptions. You don't want that to happen with your reviews, which aren't links, but which, like links, are references.

Again, the above is speculation... not based on experience submitting multiple reviews to a single Place Page, but it is based on my sense of Google in general, and on my seeing the kinds of checks that Google is placing on Hotpot submissions in particular.

[cloudtap]

I'd have your customers start to post their reviews on your hotpot page as well as your main pages as well. The posting of the reviews to the hotpot page, for example, is very good with Google although it's not absolutely necessary.

If you were to manipulate the ratings and reviews and add your ratings, etc - I'd use a proxy ip, separate accounts using the IP throughout the ratings and acct creation process as well as building friends across your different accounts.

It gets complicated but would definitely work.

[Silvery]

One possibility you could try would be to code the reviews on your Testimonials page in hReview microformat. Google has said they would possibly pull that for display from sites which have it.

If you do this, please let us know how it worked out for you!

[wrockca]

Thx Guys for all your help..

[Robert Charlton]

...code the reviews on your Testimonials page in hReview microformat

Thought I'd bump this back up and see if anyone has tried this approach.

[J_RaD]

Google is going to want different people with different Google accounts posting from different IPs. Otherwise, reviews would be very easy to spam.

If you were to manipulate the ratings and reviews and add your ratings, etc - I'd use a proxy ip, separate accounts using the IP throughout the ratings and acct creation process as well as building friends across your different accounts.

this, and this.

[spadilla]

code the reviews on your Testimonials page in hReview microformat

I've actually done this on a community business directory just trying to find out how long it takes for Google to index. Still waiting...

I am assuming that if you don't have a highly trusted site, you will likely be waiting a while for the hreview tags to be utilized(if ever). I would love to see if anyone else is having luck with this method though.

I work with alot of SMB owners who would love to pull in their "testimonials". My guess however is that indexing reviews/ratings from a business's website would be too easy to game.

[J_RaD]

^ its nice to have them their for the human visitors.....and if one day the bots start to pull from them, all the better. otherwise its just a game of getting your reviews and all the other trusted sites that goog pulls from.