Rankings drop - we've added user reviews, are they causing over optimisation on page?

[KateWaite]

Hello

Hopefully can get a few opinions on this.

We've added some user reviews to our website for key products. We added these approximately 3-4 weeks ago. In the last week we've seen keyword rankings drop on the pages they've been added to.

For example see: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/wildlife/primates.aspx

This page ranked well for both gorilla safari and gorilla safaris but both terms have dropped considerably (12 to 20 checking Google UK on the Moz rank checker). Due to the formatting required for the Rich Snippets (and we have the user review stars in the SERPS) the term "Gorilla safari" is perhaps becoming a bit spammy on the page.

Another example would be "Borneo holidays" (up and down in the SERPS between 12-18) on this page: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/far-east/borneo.aspx

Do you feel that these fluctuations in keyword ranking could be to do with this?

Thanks

[MonicaOConnor]

I think that over the past few weeks search traffic itself has declined a little, that is what I meant.

I don't think the age will matter. It will help in the users eyes to show longevity. I have reviews from 1999 on my site

[KateWaite]

Hi Monica and thank you.

Our site is cached pretty regularly, last done 10 Dec 2014 03:29:11 GMT. The decrease in rankings ties into the subsequent loss of traffic. Our rankings are fluctuating a lot though.

Some of our reviews are a few years old, do you think that this would put off current users or do you think the value of the date tag to Google is the higher priority in this instance?

Since the disavow we have built in a number of new, good quality links but I will look at the link neighborhoods to see if anything stands out.

[MonicaOConnor]

Kate,

I honestly do not believe that there is anything to worry about here. It sounds like there was a decrease in search traffic and that is all that has affected your rankings.

Do you know how to find a cached copy of your page? It will tell you the last time it was crawled. Before you do anything else, see if you can add the date and place of origin to the reviews.

If you had a manual penalty from Penguin 2.0 or 2.1 the 3.0 update should have removed any negative effects if the clean up was done properly. Since this update is rolling out at snails pace, it is possible there was a small change that affected your rankings.

After your disavow and link clean up did you build any new, quality, relevant links? Do you have a social presence and allow people to share your images and pages socially? Can any of your existing links maybe have a no so clean link profile? 3.0 really targeted link neighborhoods, which means you could be guilty by association. Take a look at GWT and see what the links to your site looks like. Use OSE to see if there is anything new you may have over looked.

Your on page optimization looks pretty good. If you haven't refreshed your link profile with new links, or, aren't using social media a lot, you could suffer the same amount of rankings loss. SEO isn't successful unless both the on page and off page op are working together.

[PeaSoupDigital]

Just a side thought - I'm not sure what the page speed was prior to the decline, but it's pretty slow at the moment. So that won't be doing you any favours

[KateWaite]

Thanks again for everyone adding their thoughts.

The traffic decline seems to have come about since Thursday 4th December. We did well out of the Penguin 3.0 update, having previously been negatively affected (link clean up and disavow put in place earlier this year). Our ranking on important terms have dropped below their pre-Penguin 3.0 uplift now though.

Our keywords have continued to drop again today with several showing a loss of 7-10 places (on top of previous drops).

I did test the expanding panels and found that Google did seem to be indexing the content okay. I have tried making one of the reviews panels permanently expanded to see if it makes a difference though but still worry it just makes the page look very spammy as the keyword is the same as the item being reviewed, so is repeated numerous times on the page.

Any further thoughts?

Thanks,
Kate

[MonicaOConnor]

"may not' be indexed is the key term there. More likely than not, it is being indexed.

[PeaSoupDigital]

According to John Meuller, any content that is only visible to a user after they have clicked a tab, button or link may not be indexed.

[MonicaOConnor]

That isn't true in this case because the reviews themselves are clearly seen in the source code. It can be fully crawled by robots, therefore it is being indexed.

[MonicaOConnor]

Keep in mind that there was holiday week in there too. The trend usually includes a decrease in search traffic the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other major holidays. If you get a large amount of traffic from the US the change in your rankings could just be due to the decrease in traffic and Google shaking the rankings up a little bit because of the change. Your CTR might have been lower because of the position change, but if your SERPs were still getting clicks at position 20, then you should see your results pop back up. Those clicks tell Google that your SERP is relevant to the searcher and could cause them to go back up.

I say add the day, city and state of where the reviews came from. That is very important.

Since this is related to content and not to any nefarious link building, I would look at the Panda updates and not Penguin. If you really think it could be Penguin then check your GWT account for any jumps in links or messages from the spam team.

It isn't uncommon after you make a change to see your results go backwards. I think that if after this week and possibly next week you don't see any progress, you should remove the reviews, wait a couple of weeks and see what happens. If your rankings go back up, then the problem is the reviews. If not, there is something else going on.

[GPainter]

You mention in the last week, Penguin has been drunkenly stumbling around messing with most SERPs as seen here - http://algoroo.com/ and here - http://searchengineland.com/holidays-google-breaks-updates-rules-gives-fresh-penguin-updates-210367

Could it be due to this?

[PeaSoupDigital]

As already said, it's unlikely these comments are negatively affecting the page. Moreover, Google's John Meuller intimated that hidden content within 'click to expand' style boxes is not indexed. With this in mind, only the most recent review will be looked at by Google.

[KateWaite]

Sorry I forgot to add, we have seen some decrease in CTR but this corresponds to the decrease in ranking so I would expect the CTR to be lower at #20 than #12 for example?

[KateWaite]

Hi all

Thank you for your responses, I appreciate you taking the time to look at our website.

I'm glad that the general consensus is that the user reviews are good content, all the review content should be accessible to Google bot and isn't hidden at source level, it's just behind an expanding panel to stop the page becoming too long. We'll look at rewording the first paragraph to make sure it is very specific to the reviews on that page and won't appear as review spam.

The reviews are all genuine - it is a concern that that may appear otherwise; we may have to look again at whether to include dates. The reviews we receive are generally really positive, which from a company perspective is great, but I can understand why users may be skeptical.

If the fluctuating keyword rankings for these pages aren't connected to the new reviews then I'm not sure what else could be causing it - Penguin 3.0 related updates?

[RobertJakobson]

On a first look I would propose that the following paragraph just before the reviews themselves is problematic:

_"Natural World Safaris tailor-make gorilla safari holidays to meet your requirements. This gives you complete flexibility and allows you to choose your preferred travel dates, areas you wish to visit and the standard of accommodation that suits your style and budget. Please see below reviews from clients who have returned from our gorilla tracking safari holidays." _

Try rewriting that or removing that. Your page is already über-optimised and the first sentence is just over-the-top keyword stuffing. Also rethink hiding your reviews behind a plus button. Because the reviews are hidden as secondary content the Google bot sees the above paragraph as the same review for all the different pages. Thus thinks this is review spam across your otherwise very beautiful and, again, extremely optimised pages.

It is reasonable to expect that Google will want to combat review spam since many people use review mark-up for nefariously ranking higher.

drWVAnY

[DirkC]

I agree with Monica, it's seems unlikely that adding user reviews would affect your rankings in a negative way.
Did you also notice a decrease in traffic on these pages?

That been said, I don't doubt the quality of the products you offer, but to be very honest, the reviews look a bit fake (they are all very positive, there is no date on the reviews), and apart from the two you mentioned, I don't find a lot of other reviews on the site (first 10 pages of site:www.naturalworldsafaris.com reveal maybe 5/6 holidays with reviews, and then it's minimum 3 reviews). Don't think this would have an impact on the search results, but probably something to think about for your human visitors

[MonicaOConnor]

In my opinion, this is highly unlikely. User reviews are the holy grail of on page content.

I would check GWT to see if you have had a decrease in CTR organically. This can temporarily effect your rankings. What other changes have you made to these pages? It could just take another week or too for the page to be crawled and indexed properly. When is the last time these pages were cached?