In last week's blog post I bemoaned the fact that search engines had conspired to give Dovetail a lot of useless traffic; namely people looking for sample testimonials. That post piqued my interest in what people wanted with our "sample testimonials".
"Surely they're just satisfied customers looking for inspiration to write their own genuine testimonials", I thought. I was wrong.
I started by taking snippets from our testimonials, replacing the word "Dovetail" with the wildcard character (*) and performing a search. Here is a sample. Our testimonials were being stolen.
Some people used our testimonials as starting points for their own unique variation. They'd copy a couple of sentences from our testimonial and then they'd take it from there:
Others would be a bit lazier and just replace "Dovetail" with their own company name:
Others were lazier still. They didn't even manage to remove "Dovetail":
My personal favourite is a copy of our testimonial from Inland Fisheries Ireland, a very specific testimonial:
As you can imagine, I began to doubt all testimonials as I went through this process. I have been assured, however, that all of Dovetail's testimonials are real.