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How to Handle Product or Business Reviews in Other Languages / Countries

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google reviews languagesAn interesting question came up in yesterday’s Google webmaster office hours with John Mueller about reviews and using them on sites for different countries and languages from the initial review.

We’ve just launched websites in Canada, Australia and South Africa. Am I allowed to use the UK customers’ product reviews across these new sites (we have hreflang in place)?

Here is Mueller’s response:

From our point of view, that’s fine, if these are your reviews for your content then that’s something you can put on these sites.

What I would just caution away from doing is using automatic translation to translate them into other languages.  So if you have these reviews in English, and you open a site in French for example, then you shouldn’t use any kind of automatic translation tool to translate that content into French because that automatically translated content is usually lower quality and would be something that the web spam team would see as autogenerated content, which would be against our webmaster guidelines.

So within sites that use the same language, sure, and you can also use it on the French site, but you should use it in the original language of the review

If a webmasters was allowed to translate reviews themselves, you could definitely see how some would translate them to give a better meaning to the words.   But by keeping them in the original language, there is some accountability.  And if they are in a different language, a visitor could always use a translation tool to translate the review, if they really wanted to read it.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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