We've got quite a few Google Places / Google local reviews from our clients which is great, but we'd like to display some of them on our website under a 'testimonials' section.Ideally I would just copy and paste them into the site, but I was thinking this may be flagged as duplicate content. Any thoughts on the best way to handle this, or does any one know if Google allows you to republish your own reviews on your own site?Another way I was thinking of doing it was to copy and paste the reviews into Photoshop, format them how I want, and then export them as a .png (because they create crisper lines than .jpg), but this is not ideal.
Using Google Places reviews as testimonials on a site - would that be considered duplicate content?
seo;duplicate content;local seo;website review
I think this depends on what percentage of the page the testimonial would make up, and whether there would be one testimonial per page or multiple on a page...If it was just one testimonial per page and it represented the majority of content there, you should add a canonical link to the original page to let Google know where that content can be found, to prevent the potential for duplicate content penalties: Google Webmaster Tools: Canonical LinksIf there are multiple testimonials on a page, as an alternative to using images, you might consider using an iframe for them, since the iframe's content will be indexed for the originating site and not your containing page, thus also avoiding any potential for duplicate content.