Have you ever wanted to show off your online reviews on your website? If you are a small business, it’s a best practice for a few reasons:
- It makes it easy for your customers to leave you an online review
- It shows potential customers that you are transparent about your reviews and what your customers say about you
- It gives potential customers that extra little bit of encouragement to come see you or call
We’ve created a WordPress Plugin that will look up your online reviews on Google, Yahoo, Yelp, Bing, Citysearch, and even your Foursquare checkins and create a nice badge that you can display anywhere on your site.
Watch the Video
This video shows you how to set it up, and how it works:
Here’s what the badge looks like:
Download the Plugin
Note: we have suspended downloads of the MyReviewsPage Plugin until we can solve problems retrieving Google Places reviews. Google does not provide an API for this and our current method breaks every time they change their page layouts. Sorry! I only want to deliver great experiences and this is too fragile with the current method we’re using.
Try it out and let me know what you think!
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{ 45 comments… read them below or add one }
cool WP plugin. Gonna have to test it on my own sites and see how it runs. I have a few review ones I can try.
Don,
I think you have a winner here!
Great idea, wish I thought of it.
Thanks @brandi
Thanks Matthew!
Hi Don,
It is a GREAT plugin…
I just downloaded the plugin, it works.. however it kinda messed my template abit…. I dunno what happened….
everytime I have the plugin activated, i would suddendly get blue links on my site, and some text on articles are cut off…
I am using the hybrid theme with wordpress 3.01 ….
Thanks Don!
Great plugin. I was just about to tackle something like this myself. You saved me a ton of work. What about adding a widget to display a smaller version of the reviews in a sidebar?
@agus, we found some css conflicts with some templates, and updated the plugin to resolve that. Try re-downloading it and that should fix the problem you are seeing.
@Kevin – thank you! Yes that is a great idea. We’re working on a widget to display in the sidebar too…
hi Don,
thanks for the update… it works great now
I was out of town when you launched this. Awesome work!
Hey thanks Mike!
This is a MUST have! Thanks for this great additional feature
Great! I just looked for something like this last week and couldn’t find it. Thanks for sending it out in your e-mail updates. I’ll give this a try. I would like to have it actaully show some of the reviews from Google. I thought about doing a screen grab of the google info and having that as a picture on the page, with this link box below it to where they can go and confirm the info is factual.
Is there actually any SEO advantage having this on your site?
@Karen – well, the link that you provide to your Google Places page helps your listing (yes, that is a web page with its own URL that can benefit from having links into it.)
The other advantage is showing your customers that you are being transparent about your online reviews, and getting more online reviews can help your rankings in the Google Maps listings.
@Katia – thank you!
@ Matt – that is a good idea, and one we’re looking at for a future version…
I have added the plugin, but it does not show that we have three Google reviews. I changed the links, and you can follow the link on the plugin and see we have three reviews. Any idea why it is not updating? It’s also not finding the Bing page that I copied and pasted in the plugin.
http://www.bennettchiropracticsmyrna.com/testimonials/
Something else I tried is doing a screen capture of some of the Google reviews, adding that to the page, and then changing the target URL of the image hyperlink to go to the Google Local page instead of the image in wordpress. That way the user has some reviews looking them in the face when they go to the review page on our site, and if they click on it they can see the actual source.
@Matt – I like the screen shot you put in there to show the review comments. Nice touch!
I’ll take a look at your Google reviews to see if I can find out why those aren’t coming back for you.
This is great Don, now I need to find a nich where I can get reviews. I am going to try it and see if I have any in the animal world first I guess.
Now you got me thinking about my next project. You may have created a fire.
This is awesome Thank you.
Wendy
Hi Don;
Awesome tool for displaying and getting reviews. Is it o.k.
to install this on customers websites?
Thanks,
Nick
@Nick, absolutely – the plugin is free so install away! Thanks for asking
@Wendy, I like to create fires – good luck with your project!!
hey don, having some trouble with the plugin collecting accurate data. hoping you can help.
please watch this video – http://screencast.com/t/MTMzZTJkN
cheers,
matty t
@matty – Thanks for providing the video; we’re looking into this right now. I’ll update here when I find out what is causing that.
BTW – I’ve been to Melbourne – it’s awesome there!
Hi,
First I would like to say this is a great plugin. Very nice work.
A small thing I noticed. When using an “apostrophe” in the business name it looks like a filter may be added a backslash.
Example: Jasper’s turns into Jasper\’s
-Kevin
Thank Kevin!
Darn – I thought we fixed that. Do you know, are you using the very latest version of the plugin? If you are and this is still happening, we’ll dig in and check it out.
Hi Don,
I install it last night from the wordpress plugin directory. Version 1.3f as listed
The good news is its not impacting review results.
Take care
-Kevin
Many thanks for this plugin – it is exactly what we were looking for and well thought out.
Thanks for the plugin Don. It’s very promising but seems to have a few bugs. For example it’s not finding Yelp pages for businesses even when we provide the correct phone number on the listing, and not linking to the Bing listing even when we put the correct URL in there. Look forward to a bug fix to make this even better!
Hi Don:
Great tool. I have a question. When I go to my google place page for the Internet Marketing Association of Hawaii on Maui, HI we have 10 reviews, but when I place the link into your plug-in, it shows “0″ reviews. Any idea what’s going on?
Thanks Don. Love the tool.
Aloha, Bob
Hi Don,
Love the plugin! I have a question about using this for a business that has multiple locations – and therefore multiple reviews accounts on each review site?
As an example, If Hilton Hotels wanted to use this, how would you recommend implementing it so they could show the relevant reviews for each individual hotel from the 1 Wordpress install?
Thanks for your assistance!
Mat
We are using this plugin, and it’s great, however it does not find some of the pages even when we put in the direct listing URL. Also, it does not display the number of reviews correctly…can you fix this?
Hi Cary,
Sorry – Google changed some things and we are working on a fix.
Glad to hear. Also, I have never been able to get Yelp and some of the others to display properly. It just won’t find our business when I provide a direct link or our phone number. I hope you guys can fix these issues because you have a killer idea here
Hi there, I can’t get this plugin to work with my site. My google place/reviews are Australian. So is the site. The plugin loads OK, but it just displays 0 reviews. Any suggestions? I think u say somewhere that this plugin may only work for US sites. Any plans to make it work for other countries? Thanks you, brilliant plugin and strangely, nobody else is doing this – So great innovation too!
@RSA – unfortunately the APIs we are using only support U.S. based companies right now. Hopefully they will update them for international use soon!
I have troubles with this tool too. It isn’t working correctly. I wouldn’t not recommend you waste your time working with it. It can’t find my yelp page or get the correct amount of google reviews. I haven’t even tried the other. No point in wasting my time. If they where ever to get this tool to work correctly all the time. I would use it. Hell I might even pay for it if it worked and I could trust and count on it.
Hi Brian,
I’m sorry you are having trouble. Unfortunately Google does not provide an API to collect review information. So that means we need to parse through the page to get the results.
As a result, we get inconsistent results on some business listings. Also, when Google changes the page formats (which they do frequently) it can break our ability to collect some of the information until we update our code.
They are doing this so frequently now that I’ve decided to take down the WordPress Plugin, and suspend new signups for the MyReviewsPage Service until we can find a better method of collecting this information.
It’s too costly for us, and frustrating for you, to update our code every couple of weeks when they change things.
If you do re-start this plug (which I would love you to do) please gives the option of not only putting on pages or posts but putting it in the sidebars.
Thanks.
Hi Don, it appears Google has had an API for Google Places for a few months now
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Google+Places+API
are you guys planning to utilize the API anytime soon?
Hi Mike,
Yes we looked at the Google Places API, but it does not have any calls that will give you review information so it won’t help us in this situation.
Fantastic idea that I’ve long searched for… I was excited to see that plugin existed – and now it doesn’t… ;(
I’d love to try even a buggy copy!
From where i can download this plugin
I, too, would love to try a buggy copy (of course, if a solution in the near future is forseen, I could hold out). This is a great idea for a plugin. Any chance of getting a working version and/or old copy of the plugin?
Thanks!
Steve
Hi Don:
I used to use your plug in and it was great. I’m sorry that Google is making it so difficult to use.
We’re trying to create a similar program for our Five Star Review System members on our Drupal platform. Can you give me any advise on how I can best go about making this happen … even if we can’t show Google?
Thanks a million Don. I hope you can bring your plug-in back soon. I love it.
I would try using the Citygrid Media Reviews API.
Yes, as Michael says the CityGrid API is good, and the Yelp API works well too.
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