Detailed Revisions of Articles coexisting with Automated Description Articles
-
Hello all,
think per instance in a comparator of cars, motorbikes, etc, where you have dozens of brands, types of cars and motorbikes like diesel or oil, 4x4 vs sport, etc
So, in one part of your site you are reviewing them in detail, explaining everything.
You also have a database with hundreds of models with several specs like top speed, length, engine, etc so you can automatically create an info page for these hundreds of models.
How would you make both of them live together in your website?
If you add the review to the automatted articles, then you would have an unconsistency as you cannot manually review all the products. On the other hand, doing it separetly will lead to a very, very similar title posts and urls (revision vs automated versions).
In my particular case, I just had the revisions until now and my site is developed in Wordpress. I had all the url posts below the home (mysite.com/review-of-car-x-of-brand-y) and now I am going to add the automatted ones and am thinking on place the automatted ones like WP Custom Posts and the url would be mysite.com/cars/description-of-car-x-of-brand-y. But still have the problem with categories, tags, etc, etc
Well, it is long question but what do you think about this?
-
Ok. I had always wondered how the index,noindes affects to the canonical. And also if the canonical post should be included in the sitemap or not (I think that not according to your last whiteboard friday but again not sure).
Per instance, I published the following post this morning checking what you said
http://www.comparativadebancos.com/mejores-depositos-bancarios-de-marzo-de-2011/
and with a rel=canonical to this that was published at the beginning of the month
http://www.comparativadebancos.com/depositos/marzo/
but then I have the first one in google
http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=mejores+depositos+bancarios+marzo+2011
Currently I rank very well for the reviews, so dont know what will happen with the canonical.
Thanks for your answers!
-
You probably don't need to worry about the noindex tag, just the rel=canonical should be enough to get the engines recognizing the right page (and I'm not 100% sure how the noindex might interact).
-
That would been even technically easier to implement I think.
Just the last thing, I am confused with the canonical here. What should i use in the blog reviews?
1. meta=Noindex,follow and rel=canonical to the product page
2. meta=Index,follow and rel=canonical to the product page
I dont know if I have to index those posts.
Thanks!
-
Hmm... I'm not sure I like that as much as getting the product page indexed and known by the engines as the canonical version. Perhaps you could produce the RSS feed/blog with the reviews, but use rel="canonical" on those pages to point over to the product pages which include the reviews? That would be a way to potentially have your cake and eat it too
-
HI Rand and thanks for your answer and your link.
I believe that is the way to go but the point is that my site is a blog based one and then I am going to introduce a comparator with a huge product database. Therefore, I still would like to display in my home my reviews that then are automatically sent in my daily mailchimp rss newsletter and to my rss suscribers. That was my point of having two separated posts.
Thinking about it, I think this could be a solution:
1. Use a custom taxonomy as Justin Tadlock recommends http://justintadlock.com/archives/2011/01/14/rethinking-how-news-themes-work
2. Display in the home just the posts with the "Review" property and using the dhtml script you said above or a "more text" hiding the "automatted content"
What do you think about this?
Thanks a lot
Antonio
-
Hi Antonio - a lot of sites, particularly in the e-commerce field, face precisely this issue. What I've seen be most effective is what Amazon, BestBuy and many others do, which is to create a single page for any product and include editorial/user reviews and more detailed information when it's available and when it's not, leave that area open for future additions of content. This way, you have a single version of any given page and you create a positive association with the crawlers and humans that some/much/most of your content/products will eventually get a good, rich description.
You can also use Saibose's suggestion in combination if you'd prefer having this content in separate, embedded "tabs" on the page that all resolve to the same URL. Check out a code sample and example of this in action here - http://dhtmlkitchen.com/scripts/tabs/tutorial/navigation.jsp
Best of luck!
Rand -
But I will always have more automatted than custom so i think that "vice versa" is not an option.
Anyhow, I don't really see how to do it in WP? Do you have any idea?
Are there any other suggestions in the room?
Thanks saibose for your advice
-
put the reviews in # for now till you have a good content base and then carefully do the flip to vice versa.
sorry, my bad, I meant, noindex for tags and categories.
-
What is exactly your proposal? To just have the automatted ones and in # the review or the opposite?
Anyhow, the point is that I might have 1000 automated posts and 100 custom posts. If I use the # the users wouldn't know how to reach those posts with the custom review.
The reviews can be up to seven or eight paragraphs so it would really make a difference between those which do have it and don't. Therefore, I had thought on doing it separetly, like two different kind of posts.
Finally, for categories and tags, did you want to say "noindex" instead of "nofollow"?
Thanks
-
what about adding a # in the URL? Have you thought about that? That will drive all the authority to the page you want to rank higher in search.
I dont recall the video, but there was a talk that search engines disregard the part of URL after #, but crawls them.(correct me if i mis interpreted the video, or didnt recall it correctly).
But, that should be a solution to your problem.
Further you can add nofollow to your category and tag pages, if you want faceted navigation and content duplication issues to be solved.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate URL Parameters for Blog Articles
Hi there, I'm working on a site which is using parameter URLs for category pages that list blog articles. The content on these pages constantly change as new posts are frequently added, the category maybe for 'Heath Articles' and list 10 blog posts (snippets from the blog). The URL could appear like so with filtering: www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016 www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=1 All pages currently have the same Meta title and descriptions due to limitations with the CMS, they are also not in our xml sitemap I don't believe we should be focusing on ranking for these pages as the content on here are from blog posts (which we do want to rank for on the individual post) but there are 3000 duplicates and they need to be fixed. Below are the options we have so far: Canonical URLs Have all parameter pages within the category canonicalize to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general and generate dynamic page titles (I know its a good idea to use parameter pages in canonical URLs). WMT Parameter tool Tell Google all extra parameter tags belong to the main pages (e.g. www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=3 belongs to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general). Noindex Remove all the blog category pages, I don't know how Google would react if we were to remove 3000 pages from our index (we have roughly 1700 unique pages) We are very limited with what we can do to these pages, if anyone has any feedback suggestions it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xtend-Life0 -
Tools to test meta descriptions?
Hey does anyone know of any tools which can test your meta descriptions against competitors meta descriptions for specific keyword terms. I know one tool called SERP Turkey which uses mechanical turk, i was wondering if there is any others on the market? Even a tool which can automatically score your meta description against others on the SERP results page. E..g optimised, keyword, call to action, etc. Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Using the same picture, but 2 differents pages and Alt descriptions
Hi Moz experts, I have a quick technical question for you. If we would like to use the same picture on the website, but using differ Alt description and also, be sure to customize it to make sure, it will not look like the other. This strategy is for saving cost on new picture. Do you think google will see this as iidentical content ? Thank you for your hands up on this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johncurlee0 -
Why is the meta description not the same as in the index?
Hi all, When I search for keywords concerning "little wannahaves", the meta description in attachment 1 appears. This is however not the meta description I gave in. When I search for "site:littewannahaves.nl" the right meta description appears, see attachment 2. Does anyone know how why these two differ and how I can fix this? According to webmaster tools there should not be any error. Thanks in advance! P3FMNzP.png nkDXqRc.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | U-Digital0 -
Automated Statistical Data Unique Enough?
I have many pages that will soon have a lot of statistical data (real estate related). Each page represents a neighborhood, and the stats will be unique for each neighborhood. However, the stats follow a pattern on all pages: Nr o Sales year-to-date, Median Sales Price etc etc. It is great value to users, but I wonder if such pattern of similar types of calculations (though unique results for each neighborhood) across many pages will potentially be seen as lacking uniqueness as it all pages follow a similar pattern and sentence structure (Nr of Sales year-to-date, Median Sales Price etc). Adding to this, these statistics will be the only stuff that is truly unique content on these pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
HELP! How does one prevent regional pages as being counted as "duplicate content," "duplicate meta descriptions," et cetera...?
The organization I am working with has multiple versions of its website geared towards the different regions. US - http://www.orionhealth.com/ CA - http://www.orionhealth.com/ca/ DE - http://www.orionhealth.com/de/ UK - http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/ AU - http://www.orionhealth.com/au/ NZ - http://www.orionhealth.com/nz/ Some of these sites have very similar pages which are registering as duplicate content, meta descriptions and titles. Two examples are: http://www.orionhealth.com/terms-and-conditions http://www.orionhealth.com/uk/terms-and-conditions Now even though the content is the same, the navigation is different since each region has different product options / services, so a redirect won't work since the navigation on the main US site is different from the navigation for the UK site. A rel=canonical seems like a viable option, but (correct me if I'm wrong) it tells search engines to only index the main page, in this case, it would be the US version, but I still want the UK site to appear to search engines. So what is the proper way of treating similar pages accross different regional directories? Any insight would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Google Authorship. Is there a way to check all the articles by one author?
Hey guys, Is there any search query or website where I can get a list with all the articles by one author? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felip30 -
Product Colours change on ecommerce store... similar descriptions.
Hi, In the case of a RED/GREEN/YELLOW coffeemaker for example, I have say 6 pages that are indexed in google. Now, I can write very unique content for each and that gives me 6 pages in SERPS. Or make it a configurable product? What is best, and how different would the description need to be - my feeling that just changing the word colour in the text would NOT be enough. Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100