Shall I hide short product review texts from customers (to avoid google panda/quality issues)?
-
About 30% of product reviews that the clients of our ecommerce store submitted in the last 10 years are 3 words or less (we did not require any minimum length).
Would you recommend to hide those very short review texts? Where to draw the limit?
Numeric star rating would still go into our accumulated product rating.My only concern here is what impact it may have on google ranking.
To give some context, the site has for a long time some panda/phantom related issues where there are no obvious reasons that we could point to. -
It probably won’t affect badly if unique product information covers more content than those small reviews. I personally follow 80/20 rule here. If your product pages have unique engaging product information than you have no need to worry about.
During my audits I encountered 2 type of scenarios.
- Product page have canned information. Content duplicated internally or manufacturer information which duplicated externally.
- Some (rarely) store have unique product information.
In 1<sup>st</sup> case good user reviews helps a lot to create new, informative & engaging content (add uniqueness in product pages).
In 2<sup>nd</sup> having unique reviews is like cherry on cake, even small reviews won’t hurt.
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
-
Using CSS to hide anchor text
Hi all, In my website, I would like to use CSS to set the anchor text to "website design service"(my company provides web design service) but show the button text as "website", due to some artistic reasons. Therefore, the anchor text for the link is "website design service" but what users see is "websites". Does this sound spammy to Google? Is it a risky move that might hurt my SEO? Looking for some advises here. Thank you very much. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
Impact of May 2015 quality update and July Panda update on specialty brands or niche retail
We are seeing the following trend in our rankings and traffic after the recent Google algorithm updates (May 2015 quality/phantom, and July 2015 Panda), and I am curious if anyone here has encountered similar and/or has any good ideas on how to react. Background - we operate in a niche segment, but compete for keywords with large home improvement stores and mass retailers. In the past, prior to May 2015, we generally ranked higher than the large home improvement stores and mass retailers for our key specific terms in our niche. We believed that it was because we have a very specialized focus and so our store was highly relevant for someone searching in that niche (for example for the name of the product category as a keyword). In general, we ranked #1-3. Along with a few of our competitors in our niche. And then would be the big box home improvement stores in spots 5-10. The change we saw starting in May is that now all the home improvement stores and also a few large multi-category retailers took over those top 5 spots and bumped all the specialty retailers and the specialty brand manufacturers (like us) down. Our direct competitors in our niche all seem to have been impacted pretty much the same as us. So, in summary it seems like these latest updates may have favored the more general retailers but with stronger domain authority than the more specific but smaller retailers. Hard to know for sure, but this is the trend we believe we see. So, that said, what are some good strategies to respond to this situation? We can't really compete on overall domain authority with these huge retailers. And our previously successful strategy of having a very focused niche, with lots of helpful content, videos, instructional guides, etc. no longer seems to be enough. Has anyone else seen similar results since this past May? Where specialty retail or brand sites lost ground to larger general retailers? And if so, has anyone found any good strategies to gain back their previous rankings, or at least partially?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewk1 -
Google Authorship: Having others write content and authorship link to/from G+ profiles Impact Ranking?
Hi all! I am considering having several others write content for a new website and authorship link each to/from G+ profiles. Any idea of how that will Impact page/website ranking? I would think it would give more credibility to each page, and the website as a whole. No?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Product discontinued
Hi there, We have ranking top 3 for a competitive keyword, however the product linked to that keyword has just been discontinued, normally if we have alternatives to this product I would keep this page live and direct users to those alternatives products. What is best practice here? keeping the page live and telling users that this product has been discontinued and offering a helpline number? or just removing the page all together? (404) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Does Google read texts when display=none?
Hi, In our e-commerce site on category pages we have pagination (i.e toshiba laptops page 1, page 2 etc.). We implement it with rel='next' and 'prev' etc. On the first page of each category we display a header with lots of text information. This header is removed on the following pages using display='none'. I wondered if since it is only a css display game google might still read it and consider duplicated content. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
30-40% drops in organic Google traffic starting early/mid Feb to Now??
Hello All: I would really appreciate any insight that can be provided into this dilemma. I've ruled out bad links issues - we don't have them and never engaged in grey to black hat SEO linkbuilding. I cannot find the cause for this drop off. Maybe I'm missing something because I am so close to it? The site is markspace Thanks in advance for any and all help or insight!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | holdtheonion0 -
Whether our shared articles caused Panda hit to our high quality site
Hello, We are a quality site hit by Panda Our article collection: http://www.nlpca(dot)com/DCweb/NLP_Articles.html is partially articles written by the site owners and partially articles that are elsewhere on them web. We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that. Could this be why we were hit by Panda? And if so, what do we do? We've dropped way down in rank but have worked our way half-way back up. Two of our main keywords are: NLP NLP Training Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0