What is the Ideal Structure for User Generated Product Reviews on My Site?
-
I apologize for the lengthy post, but I need help!
Here is my current structure for product reviews:
My product pages displays a set number of user product reviews before displaying a link to "see all reviews". So:
Has product details, specs (usually generic from manufacturer) and 5 user product reviews. If there are more than 5, there is a link to see all reviews:
Where each page would display 10 user product reviews, and paginate until all user reviews are displayed.
I am thinking about using the Rel Canonical tag on the paginated reviews pages to reference back to the main product page. So:
Would have the canonical URL of:
Does this structure make sense? I'm unclear what strategy I should use, but currently the product review pages account for less than 2% of overall organic traffic.
Thanks ahead of time!
-
Thanks for the input Marcus!
-
Hey Will
If your current product page has variations but only varies based on the reviews it is showing then there is not really anything unique (bar the reviews) on these pages and the main content (product details) is the same.
Maybe something like what Amazon does:
1. Main Product page with some reviews or snippets
2. Reviews page (dynamic) which the primary content is the reviews
Then, the different review pages can rank on their own merit and all that user generated content does not go to waste.
You could use a static URL for your product page and a dynamic URL for your reviews page so it would be something like this:
/category/product-name.html
/category/product-name/reviews/?page=1
/category/product-name/reviews/?page=2
/category/product-name/reviews/?page=3
etcCheck out these amazon links:
product:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Girl-Dragon-Tattoo-Millennium-Trilogy/dp/1847242537The amazon links are a bit crazy, but it is a sound concept overall.
Hope it helps!
Marcus
-
Hi Marcus,
Perhaps I'll need a few glasses myself to decipher your message? I kid I kid.
I believe the structure you are referring to is what I currently have. The main product page, and additional pages with paginated user reviews. The only difference is your example list static URLs for the paginated reviews vs using a page # parameter as I have.
And could you please clarify:
"if you use rel canonical back to your main product page you are losing the benefit of all of those additional reviews."
What would happen in a scenario such as:
- I'm a spider, crawling through your product review pages
- On the 2nd page, a very nice, useful, thorough product review
- That 2nd page rel canonicals back to the main product page
- There is a SE query matching the 2nd page product review exactly
Would the main product page be listed on the SERPs, or since there was a rel canonical URL of the main product page, it poofs and disappears altogether?
-
Hmm, it's a tricky one but surely, if you use rel canonical back to your main product page you are losing the benefit of all of those additional reviews.
Just spitballing here but would it not be better to have the main product page with the first five or so reviews on and then create unique, paginated pages for the product reviews with a summary of the product details (so the reviews were the primary content).
So, we would have
product-name.html
product-name-reviews-page1.html
product-name-reviews-page2.htmlThis way, you get lots of nice long tail potential from the additional review pages that summarise the product, show the unique reviews and make it VERY easy to link back to the main product page to buy?
Seems a shame to have loads of great user generated reviews and then stop yourself ranking for them. Just make the purpose of the page clear as reviews of and the path to the main page very clear so user A with concern X can have his fears allayed and click through to buy.
Had a few glasses of wine, so hope, that makes sense.
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
-
What is the best SEO way to categorize products on an ecommerce site
What is the best way for SEO to set up categories for an ecommerce site selling beauty products. I have currently built my product categories so that if a person looks under the hydration category they find our body lotion, but also if they look under the body section of products they also will find the same body lotion. Is this a problem for SEO? I think it helps the customer find the product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuhliff0 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Altering Breadcrumbs based on User Path to Product URL
Hi, Our products are listed in multiple categories, and as the URLs are path dependent (example.com/fruit/apples/granny-smith/, example.com/fruit/green-fruit/granny-smith/ and so forth) we canonicalise to the 'default' URL (in this case example.com/fruit/apples/granny-smith/). For mainly crawling bandwidth issues I'm looking to change all product URL's to path neutral so there is only ever one URL per product (example.com/granny-smith/), but still list the product in multiple categories. If a user comes directly to example.com/granny-smith/ then the breadcrumbs will use the default path "Fruit > Apples", however if the user navigated to the product via another category then I'd like the breadcrumbs to reflect this. I'm not worried about cloaking as it's not based on user-agent and it's very logical why it's being done so I don't expect a penalty. My question is - how do you recommend this is achieved from a technical standpoint? Many sites use path neutral product URL's (Ikea, PCWorld etc) but none alter the breadcrumbs depending upon path. Our site is mostly behind a CDN so it has to be a client side solution. I currently view the options as: Store Path to product in a cookie and/or browsers local-cache Attach the Path details after a # in the URL and use Javascript to alter breadcrumbs onload with JQuery When a user clicks to a product from a listing page, use AJAX to pull in the product info but leave the rest of the page (including the breadcrumbs) as-is, updating the URL accordingly Do you think any of these wouldn't work? Do you have a preference on which one is best? Is there another method you'd recommend? We also have "Next/Previous" functionality (links to the previous and next product URLs) on the page so I suspect we'd need to attach the path after a # and make another round trip to the server onload to update the previous and next links. Finally, does anyone know of any sites that do update the breadcrumbs depending upon path? Thanks in advance for your time FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux1 -
Google Reviews
I have a couple of reviews from clients on Google that seem to have just disappeared. What gives?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
How to structure your site correctly for optimal juice flow?
Hello fellow mozzers. I have a question regarding structuring a site for optimal link juice flow. If you have an existing website that has for instance a contact page, we know its pointless for that page to have any juice at all. In a hypothetical scenario would it be ok to no index, no follow that page? What happens to existing pagerank on such a page? for instance if you have a contact page with pr 4 and you no index, no follow it, I understand the pagerank will disappear from that page but will it be distributed to other pages on your site? What would be the correct way of handling this scenario?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rightmove0 -
How Does This Site Rank So Well?!
So this website -> http://bailbondsripoffreport.com/ Ranks on the First Page for the term "Bail Bonds" It's the spammiest crappiest piece of junk website ever! lol - How does this site rank so well, it's not even a year old and it's link structure is crap. Can I like report them and have them removed lol. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utahseopros0