How to get user genreated reviews indexed properly?

[seorunner]

We are currently working to improve the deployment of a review widget on our website. The widget was deployed about 18 months ago and all reviews are behind Java navigation. I have been working with our IT staff to get the reviews into an HTML page which will either live on the product page as a tab or will be a link from the product page.

Our IT staff has suggested leaving the Java navigation for users and creating separate HTML pages specifically for search engines. Based on my experience, this sounds like a bad idea, basically creating pages just for search engines that will not be use by site visitors, although the visitors will have access to the same content via the Java navigation.

Anyone care to comment on this? Is creating HTML pages specifically for search engines a bad idea? An acceptable idea?

[kennyrowe]

They should be indexable on the same page. Reviews are very important to improve your rankings, and by creating two pages, you're essentially splitting your link juice. Plus, if your product information goes on those review pages, Google might look at it like duplicate content and consider both pages the same thing. I think it's always a bad idea to create separate pages for bots and people. If you must create two pages, you can use the canonical tag (if both pages populate the same info, minus reviews) to help clarify things. But your best choice for SEO is to have one page.

[danielpaquette]

It's hard to tell what you mean by "java navigation". That could be a lot of different things, so I'll just say this:

Everything relevant to a particular topic on one page. A product, for example:

The pictures are all on that page, the description is on that page, and reviews are on that page, everything. You can use navigational aids like accordions, or tabs using javascript as long everything for that item is on one page. No asynchronous loading, or iframes. No mess, no fuss. It's all right there for customers or search engines to find. Masking your content to weed out search engines for customers is definitely a detrimental strategy.

Plus, why in the world can't they just include the reviews on the product page? I am confused at how that is difficult. I will NEVER use AJAX for loading mission-critical content. Even if it's just our twitter feed. I use it for sending and receiving data, and loading in components like notifications or non-critical functionality.