Ecommerce site product reviews, canonicals – which option to choose?

[Improvements]

Recently, I discovered that only the first 4 reviews on our product pages are crawled and indexed. Example: http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/253432 I'm assuming it's due to the canonical that's on the product page http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/253432" />.

When you click on page 2 of the reviews, the url does not change, but the next batch of reviews appears on the product page. Same with page 3, etc… The problem is the additional pages are not being crawled and indexed.

We have to have the canonical on the product page because our platform creates multiple urls for each product page by including each category where the product resides, related link parameters, etc in the product url (example: http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/patio-furniture/outdoor-furniture/253432) – trust me, it gets ugly!

I've researched other Moz answers and I've found that there appears to be a couple of ways to fix the issue. Any ideas/help/guidance/examples on the below options is greatly appreciated!!!!

1. Show only 4 reviews on the first page and place the remaining reviews on a new page by themselves (similar to how Amazon does it). However, I would rather keep all of the reviews on the product page if possible.
2. Add page 2, page 3, etc parameters to the url to display the remaining reviews and adding  rel=prev/next. If we chose option 2, would each product page have a different canonical? If so, would it create a duplicate content issue since the above-the-fold content, title tag and meta descriptions would all be the same? Also, would you include each additional page in the sitemap?
3. We had a similar issue with our category pages and we implemented the "viewall" in the canonical. Would that work for our reviews?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[iPullRank]

Hey Cyndee,

Your issue has to do with how this is coded. Let me explain.

Here's what your paginated numbers at the bottom look like in the code:

<a title="2" data-bvcfg="3520493" name="BV_TrackingTag_Review_Display_PageNumber_2" data-bvjsref="http://improvements.ugc.bazaarvoice.com/0048-en_us/414441/reviews.djs?format=embeddedhtml&page=2&scrollToTop=true" <strong="">href="javascript://">2</a>

Notice that the "href" parameter of the anchor tag has no direct URL and because of that Google doesn't crawl to the next page in the series because there's no actual link. What would be ideal is if you had the actual URL to the second page so that it is accessible to Google as the href tag. Granted, Google will likely come back to these pages with the more feature-rich crawler and be able to access the content, but that could potentially take a long time or in fact never happen. I believe this is a function of how BazaarVoice operates, although I haven't had enough experience with it to know. A view-all page would help you get around the problem, but again, I'm not sure how that works with regard to BazaarVoice.

You can also use rel-prev and rel-next to connect the pages, but that directive often has spotty results.

-Mike

[LesleyPaone]

I was making that suggestion.

You can add an additional page for the reviews, but it might be hard to do correctly with your platform. I would look into going that route as well. A lot of times it comes down to how flexible the platform you are using is as to what you can do.

[Improvements]

Thanks for the response! I see your point w/ the watering down of the content...

Are you saying to add them to one of our tabs? I'm not sure how feasible that is because, from what I understand, our platform can only house a limited number of tabs and we currently use them all. Another issue is that we have one platform for multiple brands/sites and we all have to use the same configuration with regards to reviews.

Would you recommend keeping all of the reviews on the same page or adding an additional page (ie Amazon) for the multiple reviews?

Thanks again helping me with this.

[LesleyPaone]

I personally would recommend redoing your review area if I was making a recommendation to a client. I cannot see a good reason why they should not be located here, http://screencast.com/t/s4HDE6GZJ0Cu Also I would shrink them down so you can fit more reviews in the same space too. Here is a quick mock up of what I mean, http://screencast.com/t/omzjxmvZ  That way you could add more reviews in the same amount of space.

There are two things that are important to consider about your reviews though. If you are using them for SEO value, having them as low on the page as you have them shows that the value of them is not important. The other is the more reviews you have on the page the more watered down your content will be. They could even get to the point where they use keywords that are so different that your pages target different keywords as well.