A new service feeds customer ratings and reviews to consumer portals and comparison-shopping sites.

Bazaarvoice yesterday launched SyndicateVoice, a service that syndicates user-generated content - consumer reviews of products - to shopping portals, reports ClickZ. The company enables user reviews and ratings on the websites of some 40 retailer clients, and it is that content which will be syndicated. The first portals taking part are MSN, Pricerunner.com, and Smarter.com; content will appear on Google's Froogle, but via its open API, not an agreement with Google.

Merchants can specify which sites would display its review content. "They can control which portals can leverage the content and where it will show up. It's allowing retailers more inventory to do advertising," Sam Decker, VP of marketing and products for Bazaarvoice, is quoted as saying.

The retailer's branding is included in each review with a live link back to the retail site. The links are tracked and measured by Bazaarvoice.

Bazaarvoice retailer clients can also "reverse-syndicate" reviews from the shopping portals, increasing their own review content - either paying the shopping site for the reviews or including attribution and a link back to the portal.