A Resource for Online Reviews Tips, Strategies and Best Practices
We intend this site to be a resource for small business owners and consultants to learn about and discuss best practices for using Online Reviews. We'd love to hear your stories, tips and advice. Please join in the conversation below!
{ 28 comments… read them below or add one }
I was not aware there was a program that tracked reviews, Thank You
Hi Don, I think your review tracker is a brilliant idea. I have installed it and set it up. Unfortunately I am having a problem with it. I have chnaged the URL for Yahoo to: http://uk.local.yahoo.com/United_Kingdom/shear_ease_ltd/1041125881-e-23424975.html several times, and it appears as though it sticks. However whenver I click on the link, it takes me to: http://local.yahoo.com/info-11773189-shear-perfection-rochester
Is this a problem with Yahoo or the badge?
I have temporarily hidden the yahoo review, the Google one works fine. I live in the UK so only really the yahoo and google ones apply but its great anyway!
Hi Ashley – we’re looking into this now and will let you know what we find out.
Ashley – we looked into this and found that the Yahoo API for this particular call only works for US based businesses. We’ll keep an eye on this as they update their API and let you know when they support other countries.
This looks like it could be a great plugin! Just downloaded it but says
‘There was an error fetching the reviews’. DO you enter the fullURL for Foursquare or /venue/xxxxxx? Just entering the ID results in ‘Your business was not found on Foursquare’.
The same error message displays for Yelp even though there is a page on Yelp for the business. For Google it shows ’0 reviews’ eugh Google has aggregated reviews.
It would be appreciated if you could please make it clear what part of the URL or ID we should be entering for each item.
Hi Charles,
Yes, all you need is the ID for Foursquare. Can you use the Contact Form and send me the business phone number you are trying to set up so I can look into this? Some of the APIs are only supporting U.S. based businesses right now, so if this is a non-US based business that could be part of the problem.
Hello Don,
Great plug in. It’s very simple to use and a great idea. We have it working on some of our clients’ sites but we are having trouble with it working on one WordPress site in particular. Everything seems to install and activate ok. On the settings page we set it up and it shows the ‘preview’ as expected. When we go to the page itself it just shows the ‘badge’ and container. I did some ‘firebug’ trouble shooting and removed the ‘display:none;’ from the css and it shows all of the table rows and content but says ‘Your business was not found at ____’ were a link should be.
Any direction would be much appreciated.
This will surely revolutionize the way we handle and monitor reviews. What a time saver.
Great job Don. This is really a godsend for lazy small business owners. I was think of similar script for managing yelp review for a client of mine. I hope your plugin will do just fine.
Hi,
I have installed your plug in. I am sharing an office with many other doctors, all with separate business on Yelp, Google places, etc. I initially set the plugin to “find automatically” and it pulled up the Yelp business page for one of my other colleagues in this office. I then put in the URL for my Yelp page, and selected the “Use this URL” option, but it does not seem to be letting go of my colleagues site.
Help?
@Jerry, could you give me a link to the page that you’re seeing this on?
@Becky,
Can you give me the link to your page and to your Yelp profile? I’d have to look at it to see what’s going on…
Here’s the link to the page on my site, it is “hidden” so public can’t see it (no navigation links to it)
http://naturalmedicineexpert.com/?page_id=113&preview=true&preview_id=113&preview_nonce=6276a028f1
Here is my Yelp business page:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/becky-andrews-nd-lac-seattle-2
as you can see the Yelp part of the plug in grabbed my colleagues page. We all share the same address and phone number….but the URL over-ride does not seem to be working…
Hi Becky,
The link above is a preview link so I can’t view it. But I did look at your Yelp link, and my guess is this: since you don’t have a suite # associated, then the Yelp API is probably getting confused an returning the first result at that address. I don’t think I’ll be able to change that but I’ll have my developer look into it.
oops…
is this the right link?
http://naturalmedicineexpert.com/?page_id=113
What is a suite #? is that something I can / need to get on Yelp?
Thanks for your speedy replies!
OK, assuming you meant a suite # in the snail mail address listed on Yelp, I added one (just made it up) to see if that helped….it didn’t after fiddling around with the plugin here’s what I think:
It is not accepting the URL override, and it is not accepting any modifications after the initial data entry… it did take the suite number addition, but it will not allow me to delete the shared phone number, it just keeps re-populating it.
Also on your actual website, there is a screen shot of an actual “dashboard” for this plugin. I don’t seem to have one of those, and don’t see any way to send an email to my clients to request reviews… do those come along later? Or am I missing part of the plugin or a second plugin?
I’ll try to log back on in the morning and see if you had any more thoughts… I hope there is an easy solution to this, I’d really, really like to use this plugin…
I think it has very cool potential, and would make a big difference!
Thanks in advance,
Becky
I was wondering if all the bugs have been worked out for the my reviewpages.com
How has it been working for the people using this. I would appreciate any feed back you may have.
Thanks
Jim
can i change the size of the badge? i want to put this in my sidebar and it is just a tad too wide? how can I or can I modify this?
This plugin seems fantastic. My only issue is that it seems to be pulling info incorrectly. For instance, on Google Places, it shows we have a 5 star rating, but it says 0 reviews.
I’ve tried to add the plugin to one of our sites and it seems to strip all of out css layout once activated. Is there any work around for this? We are using the Genesis Framework and operating the latest version of WP.
Thank you.
Jeff – we’ve only formatted the badge for one size – sorry. We would like to make it a sidebar widget at some point in the future but it’s challenging to fit all that information in a much smaller footprint.
Ray – it looks like Google has changed up their screens on us again. They don’t have an API for this so we have to grab the info from the screen. Sometimes they change the layout and it makes it hard to gather the info. We’ll look into this.
Brad,
I have not seen that on the current version of the plugin… I don’t know of a work-around but I’ll try find a Genesis site to test it with.
Hi, this is a great tool – thank you!
Hi, as I understand now Google does not allow you to retrieve this dataunless you pay for it due to their Terms of Service. How do you collect this info from google? They do not have an APi, are you scraping the info?
great plug in, I was wondering if there was any further development to offer many different reviews on different pages. I have a business directory and would like to show reviews for multiple listings, Say I have company A at 317-555-1212 and company B at 317-555-8888. I would like to show reviews for both. Just checking, any ideas would be great.
I’d like to be notified whenever you get this issue straightened out, please.
Very interested in looking at this further.
Kind regards,
Juan M. Colome, CEO
Infoseek Technologies
Hello – great idea and I’d love to use it but it won’t let me pull the reviews from Yahoo. Also it is too wide and I don’t seem to be able to change the size. Any thoughts?