There’s long been a concern among “local” business owners and marketers that Yelp might filter or otherwise remove your hard-earned reviews if you copy and paste them onto your site. Yelp’s a killjoy, so there’s some basis for that assumption.
But it turns out Yelp is fine with your publishing Yelp reviews on your site (and sometimes elsewhere), under a few conditions.
I couldn’t find the official policies on that practice posted anywhere, and a recent conversation on Google+ got me wondering, so I asked. Here’s what Lucy at Yelp HQ told me the other day:
We have a few common sense guidelines if you want to use your Yelp rating and reviews in basic marketing materials, including your own website:
DO ask the reviewers themselves before using their reviews. You can contact them by sending them a “Private Message” on Yelp through your Business Account.
DO stick to verbatim quotes, and don’t quote out of context. If a review has colorful language that doesn’t suit your needs, you should probably move on to the next review.
DO attribute the reviews to Yelp using the Yelp logo (e.g.,”Reviews from Yelp”), and do attribute the reviews to their authors and the date written (e.g.,”- Mike S. on 4/5/09″). Yelp logos can be found at https://www.yelp.com/developers/getting_started/api_logos.
DON’T distort the Yelp logo or use it in any way to suggest that Yelp or its users are affiliated with your business or helped create your marketing materials. Your business and your marketing need to stand on their own.
DON’T alter star ratings. Average star ratings change over time, so you also need to include the date of your rating nearby (e.g.,”**** as of 5/1/09″).
While we would hope not to, we reserve the right to change these guidelines from time to time or rescind our permission for any or no reason.
Reasonable enough, except for that last clause. It also squares with what I’ve found to be true of reviews (Yelp and Google+) regardless of policy: they just don’t get filtered if you repurpose them.
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What’s been your experience with reusing reviews? Do you ask customers first? Have you run across businesses who flagrantly go against Yelp’s reuse policies? Leave a comment!
My concern about copying reviews is whether it’s going to cause duplicate content problems for ranking. Thoughts on this?
I wouldn’t be concerned, Leif. For one thing, you wouldn’t be using the review content as a way to rank.
Relevant post:
https://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/01/02/12-kinds-of-duplicate-content-in-local-seo-which-ones-are-trouble/
Good work Phil. I like that response. As far as the last paragraph, this is the web, after all, and it is local. What you see today is going to change tomorrow. That should be the motto for the industry.
Anyway I looked at some smbs we run wherein we “manage reviews”. Cripes. On the Yelp side we have respectively 70%, 80%, and 85% filtered yelp reviews.
The specific issue with getting them up and that response from yelp is that I don’t think there is an easy way to communicate with the yelp reviewer through yelp if the review is filtered. I’ll have to revisit that.
In our cases the filtered are essentially non active yelpers.
Boy in two of our verticals customers just rely on reviews. Fortunately we have some smbs with just great service….and we do get great reviews.
We have “fiddled with that dance and situation. We’ll address it with more effort.
Thanks, Dave.
I can sort of understand Yelp’s reasoning for not letting you DM the writers of filtered reviews. Just curious: what would you be asking/telling them? Short of persuading them to become habitual Yelpers, there’s not much you can do.
Thanks for the great information and cleaning this subject up. Great Post. May I share
Tim
Thanks, Tim. Please do!
I’ve been leaving the reviews alone that actively show on Yelp and have been taking reviews from the “not recommended” section on Yelp and copy/pasting those to the clients’ sites w/ their initials, date and location.
Most Yelpers never venture to that section and this way you can actually make use of the legit filtered reviews.
That’s a good move, Ben.
So is it ok to copy and past the not recommended reviews from yelp and post them on the Facebook business page?
We, like many businesses have countless great reviews on Yelp that
have been flagged as “Not recommended” by Yelp’s algorithms. Almost all
are from users who have many reviews of other businesses and full
vibrant profiles. Yet, several 1 star reviews remain on our page even
though the user has no picture, has never rated any other businesses and
has absolutely noting on their profile. Whenever we receive a 1star
review on Yelp that we know is not legitimate which is most, we respond
in the same way. Something to the effect of;
This
is a fraudulent review from a competitor. We’ve reached out to
Yelp about these on several occasions. Their generic email reply indicates
there is not actually anyone at the wheel at Yelp. What anyone will
notice about any of these reviews is that the reviewers have never
reviewed any other businesses, have no picture, no friends, and no
legitimate activity what so ever.
I wish we could review Yelp… ZERO Stars!
We have also noticed that thousands of business owners have had great success by filing complaints against Yelp with the Better Business Bureau.
Good Day Phil,
May I ask for your opinion as I (think) cannot find my answer in here https://www.yelp.com/brand.
From Lucy’s email it did mention we can use them following the guidelines however I am a bit confused if I can use both the recommended and not recommended to shop up in the website. The guideline from Yelp says to quote “Only use Yelp’s recommended reviews (i.e., do not use reviews that aren’t currently recommended)”. Does this mean that we can show Yelp’s review in our website BUT ONLY the recommended ones and cannot at all show the not recommended reviews. Looks like all our GOOD review are under the not recommended. I hope you can shed some light on this.
Thanks,
Patrick
That’s a gray area, Patrick. On the one hand, I’d say you can use the “not recommended” reviews. (I mean, what’s Yelp going to do? Filter them again?) OTOH, I think what Yelp wants to avoid is a situation where you have 10 reviews on Yelp, 8 of which are filtered, and you slap all 10 on your website and say something like “As seen on Yelp!” The filtered reviews are orphans. I would just treat them as you would a testimonial that a customer writes for you on a perfumed letter – rather than on a specific review site.
Very useful information. Does anyone know if Yelp changed their policy in this regard? My question to Phil is this: I’m thinking of pulling extracts from all my Yelp Reviews (both recommended and not recommended) plus all my Google reviews, publish the extracts on a web page (crediting Yelp / Google) and then tally the average of all the reviews and use this as a star rating on my site. Do you see any problem with this?
It’s fine to copy and paste the reviews or excerpt them, but you can’t mark them up with Schema.org or any other structured-data markup so as to get the “stars” showing in the organic results. Google has put the kibosh on that. I have seen sites get penalty notifications in Google Search Console for doing that.
Can I share yelp reviews on my Facebook Business Page? Do I have to ask the yelper’s permission as well? Whats he best way to share the review. copy/paste?
I would assume that’s OK with Yelp, Nicole. Probably a good idea to ask the reviewer, though.
Linking to the review in your FB post might be simplest.
Yelp has an embed option for their reviews now, and it looks pretty darn good. It appears as “Embed Review” when you mouseover a review on the regular Yelp page (not business).
https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2016/10/embedded-reviews-at-yelp.html
https://www.yelpblog.com/2016/07/embed-feature-sharing-yelp-reviews-national-parks
I was planning to use that rather than a screenshot or something for Yelp at least. (It would be nice if Google followed that). But that does raise some questions. They don’t say much about it and don’t allow for comments on their posts about it.
This info will be coming from Yelp so it would rely on their side continuing the embed service. If there were some issue, a location move, or something out of the ordinary, I could see the reviews not showing suddenly. They could change their embed method or code as well.
But I’m also curious about what happens if the Yelp filter removes a review you have embedded. Will the embed still work or will it disappear? I know a lot of times reviews will show initially and then be filtered within a day or so (usually people that have just 1 review), so I wonder how it will work with those.
Thank you! I just did a post on this, based on your intel: https://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2017/03/28/yelp-provides-embed-code-for-showcasing-yelp-reviews-on-your-site/