Hey folks - I have my company listed on google businesses. I was wondering if anyone knew if having reviews by customers helps with your SEO efforts. Also - does google check IPs of the messages. Whats to stop someone posting 100 +ve reviews for themselves? Thanks! Spock
those reviews are not effective wrt seo effects. also google have different type of tracking so its waste
User generated content like reviews will often help with SEO. Because they are written by random people with no thought about SEO, they will often help your URL where the reviews live rank for all kinds of long tail keyword phrases that you would never have thought of. But put the reviews on a page other than the product being reviewed. This way the product page can be optimized separately to rank for "Product X" and the reviews page(s) can target "Product X Reviews" or "Reviews of Product X". But the reviews need to be legitimate for it to work. If you're planning on writing a 100 reviews yourself as if you were 100 different people, you'll likely fail. Google cannot tell that the 100 reviews/comments were from 1 IP or 100 IPs. But people can generally tell if the 100 are "fake". And you'll need to post good AND bad reviews. Don't just approve good reviews and never approve bad reviews.
Well, as many links from the same IP do not count as more than one link by SE, but in case of reviews, these are for users and they do not look for IP and in sometimes if they impresed by reviews they will go to by the product and in thsi way these revies will be beneficial but that not help to rank well on search engines or in incresing web presence.
Ok - sounds like it's worth asking my customers to write a review. Some conflicting answers regarding whether they have SE benefits. Thanks to all who commented. Spock