Q: Hi, I am doing SEO for a customer and need to enter reviews into different sites.  Should I  hide my ip?  What is is the best way to do it?

A: We don’t recommend uploading reviews on anyone else’s behalf, or ever reviewing a client without disclosing your identity and your association with the customer.  Doing otherwise violates FCC guidelines and could make your customer vulnerable to embarrassment if exposed, plus we just generally feel that honesty is the best policy.  In that case, obviously there would be no reason to hide your IP location.

Q: Thank you… So is it best to get folks to do reviews themselves?

A: Yep!  There are lots of ways you can encourage customer reviews.. by asking for them either verbally or in writing, including a note along with product delivery, or email follow-up after a purchase.  You can provide some incentives, but you can’t pay people for writing reviews, because again that would violate FCC guidelines about disclosure of paid relationships.

We’ll cover this and lots more in our upcoming book: Five Stars: Putting Online Reviews to Work For Your Business.