Twenty-three reference pages and a glossary of sixteen terms, starting with what a review widget actually is. Written to be accurate rather than promotional, which means several of them contradict things this site would otherwise like to claim.
The one that does that most is review schema markup, which explains why a business reviewing itself no longer gets stars in search results.
Social proof is the tendency to judge something by how other people have judged it.
User-generated content is any content about a brand created by its customers rather than by the brand: reviews, photos, videos, comments, forum posts, social media mentions..
A review is unsolicited feedback left on a platform you do not control, alongside everyone else’s including the critical ones.
An aggregate rating is the average score across all reviews of something, together with how many reviews it came from.
Review velocity is the rate at which a business receives new reviews — how many arrive per week or month, rather than how many exist in total..
A verified review is one the platform can tie to a real transaction — a confirmed purchase, a completed booking, a finished job..
First-party reviews live on infrastructure you control — your own website, your own store.
Review syndication is the distribution of reviews from where they were collected to other places they can appear — a retailer’s site, a comparison engine, Google Shopping..
The unique identifier Google assigns to a place. Find yours below.
A Google Business Profile is the free listing a business has on Google Search and Maps — name, hours, photos, and the reviews customers leave..
Rich results are search results enhanced with extra detail pulled from structured data on the page — star ratings, prices, images, FAQs, recipe times..
Review gating is the practice of filtering who is asked to leave a public review, so that satisfied customers are invited and unhappy ones are not..
Reputation management is the practice of monitoring and influencing what is publicly said about a business — reviews, search results, press and social mentions..
A widget is a self-contained block of functionality embedded into a page.
NPS, CSAT and CES are survey metrics for measuring customer sentiment.
Facebook Recommendations are the replacement for Facebook star reviews, introduced in 2018.
The answer in the first two sentences. A section on what most people get wrong, because that is the part not already available elsewhere. Tables and numbered steps rather than prose where the content allows. Dates kept true.
The pages on the FTC rule, platform policy and GDPR are summaries by people who are not lawyers. Have one read anything you rely on.
