User Reviews Question
-
On my e-commerce site, I have user reviews that cycle in the header section of my category pages. They appear/cycle via a snippet of code that the review program provided me with.
My question is...b/c the actual user-generated content is not in the page content does the google-bot not see this content? Does it not treat the page as having fresh content even though the reviews are new? Does the bot only see the code that provides the reviews?
Thanks in advance. Hopefully this question is clear enough.
-
Sure thing Jeff.
They can help in a few ways:
1. They add content to your pages (without you having to pay anything)
2. As you suggested, they can also send you some long tail traffic
3.Google can display the star rating of whatever it is you're reviewing via rich snippets:
http://www.dannyvince.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/engraved-gift-ideas-rich-snippets.jpg
However, they're a double-edged sword. If you're careful about keyword density and other on-page metrics (like I am), letting a bunch of people write the content of your site isn't the best idea.
I'm actually KILLING a competitor's site right now in the SERPs who have mostly UGC/reviews. A lot of this is because my on-page is leagues and bounds above theirs.
-
Thanks for the help Brian and Irving.
In what ways do those reviews help with SEO? Do they help with long-tail KW also?
-
Run a spider simulator to see what googlebot sees or look at the source code to see if the content is there.
Even if the content being added is not significant, if the content on the pages change often that will keep the bots coming back and respidering more often.
If it's random reviews populating randomly in the header though it won't really help for SEO. You need real reviews on that page that stay there and aggregate in order to help your SEO.
-
It depends on the way they're displayed, Jeff.
If the reviews are HTML, you bet your butt Googlebot can see them. If it's Java or Flash...that's another story.
Either way, that's not really the fresh content Google's looking for on page in my opinion.
When it comes to freshness, Google wants either a) significant amounts of content added to a site (ie. blog posts) or b) significant updates to existing content.
Either way, these reviews aren't likely to make much of a difference in terms of your rank.
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
-
How do you delete an admin user in wordpress that wont delete
I hired an indian company to do some work on three sites that I own. I used a freelancing platform and they have been banned and now when i check in my wordpress sites, the admin user will not delete. Everytime i try and delete them it comes back. I change the password and the email address, but when i check a couple of hours later it comes back again, giving them full control over my sites which they are playing around with. any help would be great. I have tried going into the cpanel but it still will not delete. my hosting company has tried to delete them but it is not working
Technical SEO | | in2townpublicrelations0 -
Hi - I have a question about IP addresses
- would it hurt link juice to host a blog on a different server to the rest of your website? I have a web host saying they can't run Wordpress as they won't support PHP for "security reasons" - one solution would be to set up Wordpress on a different server and redirect domain.com/blog there (I presume this is do-able?). But I don't know if that affects the SEO adversely?
Technical SEO | | abisti21 -
I have a mobile version and a standard version of my website. I'd like to show users some pages on the non-mobile site but keep googlebot mobile out. Is that ok?
On the mobile version not all the content of the normal site is available to the users. Since we didn't want googlebot mobile to index the non-mobile site, all the non-existent pages were returned with a 404 error. But now we'd like to show the mobile users these pages and send them to the normal site. If we allow the users to see these pages, is it ok to block googlebot mobile so these non-mobile pages are not indexed by googlebot mobile or will that create some issues for google?
Technical SEO | | bgs0 -
Questions about the Sandbox and 301 Redirects
Does the sandbox still exist? What if you have a brand new URL and do a 301 redirect from another website because the name of the service business changed? Thanks for any insight and help.
Technical SEO | | SDSLaw0 -
Very Quick Joomla Question
Hi, A client's site was previously built in Joomla and he wants us to reproduce content that was in there, but the Joomla site is no longer live and has come to me as an archive containing all the files and folders that were included. So, I am looking at the files and folders without Joomla installed. Can someone tell me quickly how to find the where the actual page content was stored? I started looking, but there are some folders I cannot open and nothing that looks as I expected. Would appreciate a hint or two from someone who knows Joomla well.. Life is too short! Thanks Sha
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0 -
301 Redirect "wildcard" question
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0 -
Question about Hm Pg Redirects
This question is for MichaelC who was helping me with a previous question that is now closed. Please refer to my question with Subject "Double 301 Redirect" It was about redirecting /home.aspx to simply "/" because that was an old URL and we have some backlinks pointing to it. If the best I could do is redirect "/home.aspx" to something like "#hm", would that work, since everything after the hash symbol is ignored? Thanks Clint
Technical SEO | | poolguy0