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I'm managing my wife's business website for her day spa. I built the site in WordPress. I'm trying to find the best solution to manage reviews and the pro and cons of each. Right now, she has a Yelp business listing with a few reviews. I'm in the process of verifying a Google+ Place for her business.

I'd like to have reviews on her site and there are many solutions for integrating Yelp via their API. But is it beneficial to do that? I have another solution for self-hosted reviews on her site that are all marked with the appropriate schema tags for reviews.

On that same note, what about reviews that show up on the Google+ Place? Are those queried from Yelp and reviews on websites, such as mine?

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  • Any suggestions on this?
    – NW Tech
    Mar 18 '14 at 20:51
  • Not entirely sure what you are asking. Some review websites provide you with the ability to show reviews from their website on your own, or you could add the ability for customers to leave reviews directly on your website and mark this up with review schema.
    – zigojacko
    Mar 20 '14 at 8:50
  • So if I showed Yelp reviews on my site, would that not get flagged for duplicate content? What does Google use for showing reviews for a business...reviews left in Google Places or a collection of reviews from around the web?
    – NW Tech
    Mar 20 '14 at 15:30
  • It's highly unlikely the reviews from 3rd party sites would meet the duplicate content threshold and even if it does make up a large majority of the page, there are ways to handle this. Google show reviews in local search from a variety of sources online depending on your niche yes.
    – zigojacko
    Mar 20 '14 at 15:48
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Reviews from Yelp can be displayed on the page using API and will only be counted for duplicate content if there is no other substantial content on the page. A solution that I suggest would be to 1. Display the called reviews via Javascript or 2. Load the reviews in a frame and disallow the frame.

This way, there won't be any trouble of duplicate content from Google. Is it beneficial? I would say yes because that way, you will get to show the reviews to users who visited the site directly and not the page on yelp.

Which way to implement? That depends on the users you are trying to cater. In a population where Yelp is not very popular, you will have to go with the option of self hosted reviews. However, if Yelp is a part of everyday life of people, or id reviews on Yelp are valued more, you should definitely go with reviews on Yelp displayed on your website with a link to the Yelp page so that even direct visitors on your website can go and visit the Yelp website and comment their reviews there.

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