How about duplicate content? (plus other concerns I have)

Thanks for trying our plugin!

1. If you would like to stop showing verified copies of your reviews on cusrev.com, please disable Trust Badges in the plugin settings. The verified copies of your reviews will be removed from cusrev.com website. You might see a bit of a delay before the verified copies of reviews are removed due to our website caching.

Please note that after disabling Trust Badges the plugin will have no way to show your visitors that reviews were verified by a third party. Also, links from cusrev.com to your website will be removed.

2. The referrals cookie is optional and is used for analytics purposes. Unless the cookie is enabled, it won’t be possible to see how many customers made a purchase on your website after being referred to your website from review forms of other stores or cusrev.com. The analytics were created for store owners. If you don’t need this information, please keep the cookie setting disabled.

3. Trust Badges is the only required setting to start showing verified copies of reviews on cusrev.com. As far as I know, we don’t have any video stating that other settings are required to display verified copies of reviews on cusrev.com.

I hope this answers your questions!

Thanks, I might have misunderstood the Trust badges setting, but you still haven’t answered about possible duplicate content penalties, so for now I have disabled the badges.

If possible, I would like you to elaborate on your strategy on how you make sure that store owners don’t get duplicate content issues. Have you considered implementing canonicals or similar towards the original product pages for instance? Or what other matters are you taking to make sure we don’t get penalties for using your plugin with trust badges activated?

Thanks!

You’re welcome!

Sorry, but we are not aware of any duplicate content penalties. Our plugin isn’t new but so far nobody have had any problems. If you could share any test(s) showing the duplicate content penalties with examples, we’d be happy to investigate it further.

Sure, here’s a good summary:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

This is an important point, and I agree that the review pages on custrev.com should be noindex or canonicalised to the shop the reviews are from.

Thanks for getting back to me and sharing a theoretical overview of the duplicate content topic!

If possible, would you be able to share an example of two URLs with duplicate content? This is just to facilitate a more practical discussion.

Well, that’s kind of the problem with duplicate content url’s, only one of them will appear in the SERP’s. Google will filter away duplicate content that doesn’t provide value/is a duplicate of something else that are considered stronger in terms of rank/authority.

If you run a web shop for instance and only provide the product descriptions from the manufacturer instead of writing unique ones, you can be quite sure that you and all other web shop owners who does the same thing will not appear in the SERP for that particular product.

I’m a tad bit surprised that you, being so focused on authority and ranking, are not aware of this… Or maybe you are ??

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by jenseo.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by jenseo.

Thanks for providing additional information!

As I mentioned above, we are not aware of any duplicate content penalties. We’d be happy to investigate your duplicate content theory but would like to have an example of this issue. If possible, would you be able to share an example of two URLs with duplicate content?

Well, all product pages on cusrev.com has duplicate content with the original website that the review belongs to.

An example: https://www.cusrev.com/sv/reviews/parfymfabriken.se/p/p-17639

Thanks for sharing the sample URL!

As far as I know, Copyscape is the most known duplicate content checker on the Internet. I did a quick check for both the cusrev.com URL you shared and the corresponding URL on the store’s website:

1. https://ibb.co/GsXvDS4

2. https://ibb.co/GxFC1t6

There is no duplicate content detected for the 1st URL.

There is duplicate content for the 2nd URL but it is on different websites: cedvard.se and nordicfeel.se (none of them is related to cusrev.com).

So, based on the example you provided, it seems that your theory about duplicate content on cusrev.com and associated penalties cannot be confirmed.

If you know any other tests for duplicate content, please let me know and we’d happy to check them as well.

Well, I only checked the first result on the cusrev.com startpage, to give you an example. As I said, all your product pages have the potential of indicating duplicate content, for instance this one:

https://www.cusrev.com/sv/reviews/laglappen.se/p/p-33779

Which gives the following result in Copyscape:

https://www.copyscape.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cusrev.com%2Fsv%2Freviews%2Flaglappen.se%2Fp%2Fp-33779

I don’t have the time to sit and look for examples for you and a tool like Copyscape can give an indication but is more for finding copycats of your content, it won’t give a true indication, since Google’s decisions on these matters are not public.

What I do know though is that your site has not taken the precautions of making sure your customers won’t get duplicate content penalties for using your services.

This is why I won’t use the badges for the time being and hope that you will take action on these matters.

Would be interesting to hear @seopie elaborate on the matter as well!

Personally I’m a firm believer of building websites in a trustworthy, appropriate, and expected manner from the start, rather than reacting to flagged errors after the fact.

While I do love the plugin, this issue of displaying reviews on cusrev.com seems to be duplicating content directly for the promotion of your own website. The aim here seems to be to rank well for longtail searches for reviews of specific products.
Essentially, it seems that you’re having shop owners work to build reviews which benefits you, in an attempt to gain brand exposure.

Please correct me if I’m wrong. But, if that weren’t the case, then there’s no argument for not canonicalising the product review pages on cusrev.com, or noindex’ing them.

Sorry for the slow response!

I disagree that specific examples of duplicate content are not important. They are essential to confirm if your theory about duplicate content is based on facts or is just an opinion.

Copyscape is a tool for checking duplicate content that I know. Maybe there are other ways to check it – please share if you know any better ones. After checking the link that you posted above I see the following result (still no duplicate content): https://ibb.co/HxtYCfv

If I look at this duplicate content theory purely from the logical point of view, it doesn’t really make sense to me as well. The content of the product page on a store’s website is significantly different from the content of the page with reviews corresponding to this product on cusrev.com. The page on cusrev.com features much less content than the store’s website and has a chance to rank only for the ‘{Product Name} Reviews’ keyword. If somebody is looking for the ‘{Product Name}’ keyword, the store’s website will be the first in the ranking.

The fact that there is much less content on cusrev.com’s page compared to the store’s product page also means that they should not be linked with the canonical relationship as you recommended.

The purpose of displaying verified copies of reviews on cusrev.com is not to gain brand exposure for CusRev (as you suggested) but to let online shoppers read authentic reviews and increase the probability of them buying a product at the store’s website.

Having said that, we understand that SEO is a highly subjective and opinionated area because search engines do not tell how their algorithms work. People will believe in what they want to believe when there is little clarity about ranking factors.

Therefore, I will not try to persuade you in my arguments. Instead, we will introduce an option to add ‘noindex’ tags to cusrev.com’s pages in the upcoming updates of our website (we are working on a new design now). The ‘noindex’ tags will enable store owners to block search engines from indexing cusrev.com’s pages, if they prefer to do so.

In summary, the duplicate content theory doesn’t seem to be logical from my point of view. Also, it could not be confirmed by facts (so far). Nevertheless, we will add the ‘noindex’ tags option in the upcoming update of the website to let everyone decide for themselves what should be the indexing settings for pages with verified copies of reviews.

I hope this answers your questions!

Thank you, I really appreciate your effort to introduce noindex as an option and that you take customer concern seriously.

Regarding the example with duplicate content I posted, at the time when I wrote the post above, it did report duplicate content but since then the matches it found has been moved further down the page hierarchy of Cusrev.

It was just a way for me to show you an example of duplicate content that actually existed on the site, took me less than one minute to find but I didn’t take a screenshot. Can do that next time if you don’t feel like trying it yourself with some links on your site that has a couple of text reviews..

Anyways, really glad you’re implementing noindex as an option, that’s a good alternative in my opinion for those of us that believe this is an issue.

Thank you!

No worries! Please watch out for the design changes on our website in the coming weeks. We will work on the noidex option shortly after releasing the new visual design.