Reviews I wrote for Amazon etc - copy to my website

[CoolBee]

One of my goals is to write reviews on books and other products related to my business. This is something new for me.
Today I wrote my first book review and submitted it to Amazon. Amazon are quite clear that the review should not be published elsewhere first. Fair enough!

I expect that most of the reviews I write for most things will only appear on my website, but I might want to post some on Amazon first.

What I am wondering is what might be the google implications if, once it is published on Amazon, I then copy it to my website?

Part of my reason for wanting to publish on Amazon is because I AM new to this and I want some anonymous uninvited feedback (so noone needs to be 'kind') on how I have written it.

[Curtis2011]

There will be no repercussions for your entire website. The only rankings that may suffer are the specific page on your website that hosts the content that was on Amazon first.

Google tends to not want to display identical content on a single page of Google results. If they find two pages with identical content, they will generally display only one of those pages on the first page of results, and the other page will be bumped down to the second page or below. Occasionally, the second page will not be ranked at all.

The "duplicate content" forewarning from Google has actually been misunderstood by most webmasters out there, even after Matt Cutts (guy who writes most official Google blog posts) has tried to clear up the issue. Basically the duplicate content warning just says not to have multiple pages on your website that contain the same content as each other.

For instance, if I wrote one page about Blue Cars, and then cut the word Blue out and replace it with Red and posted it as a new page, with the only difference being the one word, and I tried to pass those nearly-identical pages off as two separate keyword-focused content pages, they would qualify for a downranking/penalty as "duplicate content" under the Google rules.

As far as copying content from other websites, generally Google will only punish the single page of yours that contains nothing but copied content. Obviously, if every page on your website is content copied from elsewhere, then it will appear that Google is punishing your entire website, when really it is just punishing each page individually.

If you add a new page to your website that contains copied content, it will generally not affect the ranking of the rest of your website's pages at all.

tl;dr: There's nothing to worry about.

[Sandstone]

Thank you so much for that detailed explanation. I learned a lot.

[CoolBee]

Great info, thanks Curtis.

[chadcharlie]

There is a debatable solution to Google's crawling over duplicate content, and that is to use an adequate article spinner to produce the same article, in essence, but 30 to 50% different than the original.

I will leave the ethics debate of that to your own research and decision, but in the same sense that a press release is useful, spun articles, released to multiple platforms are useful also.

Take care,
Chad.