{"id":14149,"date":"2013-01-18T17:57:31","date_gmt":"2013-01-18T21:57:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=14149"},"modified":"2013-01-18T18:12:02","modified_gmt":"2013-01-18T22:12:02","slug":"do-review-contests-that-donate-to-charity-violate-googles-review-guidelines-yes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/18\/do-review-contests-that-donate-to-charity-violate-googles-review-guidelines-yes\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Review Contests that Donate to Charity Violate Google’s Review Guidelines? Yes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week when I reported that\u00a0Review Contests Violate Google’s Guidelines<\/a>,\u00a0Dave Squires, Contractor’s Online Access<\/a>\u00a0asked this\u00a0question<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Review<\/p>\n

HI Mike, In Seattle last year I was in local U when I asked Joel Headley during his presentation about indirect incentives. We have a system that provides an incentive to customers by offering to make a monetary donation to 1 of 5 local charities the company owner selected, if the customer would donate some of their time to leave a review\u2013good or bad.<\/p>\n

We did this so that the customer had no direct gain from it and it fit within the Google \u201cdo no evil\u201d mission statement. We wrote the program that managed and tracked this for our customers because we liked the idea that it could potentially generate thousands of dollars to worthwhile charities around the country. At local U<\/a>\u00a0Joel specifically said that Google would never have a problem with a program that donates to charity to \u2018incentivize\u2019 a customer to take the time to leave a review. I am curious if this is still true.<\/p>\n

Personally, I would love to see Google endorse this concept since we learned it does very well as an incentive for customers to take the time to leave a review without any direct reward to them\u2026 and it would generate a lot of money to many great local charities if others ran with our idea as well.<\/p>\n

Google’s response:\u00a0“Any incentive offered in return for a review of a specific business is against our policy.<\/strong><\/em>”<\/p>\n

I guess that you can conclude that any incentive of any sort for a review on Google is not allowed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week when I reported that\u00a0Review Contests Violate Google’s Guidelines,\u00a0Dave Squires, Contractor’s Online Access\u00a0asked this\u00a0question HI Mike, In Seattle last year I was in local U when I asked Joel Headley during his presentation about indirect incentives. We have a system that provides an incentive to customers by offering to make a monetary donation …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t