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
-
Client wants a seperate .tv domain for their media/videos instead of a subdomain/subfolder. What is the best way to pass of link equity to a new domain?
We have a client that wants to place their video content on a .tv tld instead of a subfolder/subdomain in their .com website. They believe that the .tv domain will better represent the media experience of their business. We can understand this client's position however we are concerned about their .tv domain will lose out on the link equity if it were no longer placed in the .com's subdomain/subfolder. Here are our questions: 1. What would be the best way to pass of link equity from .com website to a new .tv domain? Should we just have a video link on the .com website that 301 directs to the new .tv domain? 2. Is there any SEO benefit of having a .tv domain for Google Video queries or even Youtube? 3. Is there any long term value of having two different websites? For link equity purposes we understand that it would be better if everything was in a .com. However is a .tv domain ideal for a better representation of their media content? We appreciate any feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
How to fix issues from 301s
Case: We are currently in the middle of a site migration from .asp to .net and Endeca PageBuilder, and from a homebrewed search provider to Endeca Search. We have migrated most of our primary landing pages and our entire e-commerce site to the new platforms. During the transition approximately 100 of our primary landing pages were inadvertently 302ed to the new version. Once this was caught they were immediately changed to 301s and submitted to the Google’s index through webmaster tools. We initially saw increases in visits to the new pages, but currently (approximately 3 weeks after the change from 301 to 302) are experiencing a significant decline in visits. Issue: My assumption is many of the internal links (from pages which are now 301ed as well) to these primary landing pages are still pointing to the old version of the primary landing page in Google’s cache, and thus have not passed the importance and internal juice to the new versions. There are no navigational links or entry points to the old supporting pages left, and I believe this is what is driving the decline. Proposed resolution: I intend to create a series of HTML sitemaps of the old version (.asp) of all pages which have recently been 301ed. I will then submit these pages to Google’s index (not as sitemaps, just normal pages) with the selection to index all linked pages. My intention is to force Google to pick up all of the 301s, thus enforcing the authority channels we have set up. Question 1: Is the assumption that the decline could be because of missed authority signals reasonable? Question 2: Could the proposed solution be harmful? Question 3: Will the proposed solution be adequate to resolve the issue? Any help would be sincerely appreciated. Thank you in advance, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FireMountainGems0 -
Product Descriptions for a product with many designs
I'm a newbie with SEO and I have a question regarding product descriptions. Let's say I am selling 100 dog id tags. The tags are all made of same materials, same size, just different designs. Now for the product description, do I need to write a different set of description for all 100 tags? This is an example of a short product description(there's more) for all the pet tags: Personalized with 4 lines of information and 20 characters in each line. Lifetime guarantee - If your pet ID tag ever becomes illegible, we will replace it free of charge. Solid one-piece construction - No glued or ""sandwiched"" materials to wear out or fall apart. Split ring for collar attachement included with EVERY tag. Countless uses - School backpacks, luggage, fashion accessories, and many more! All of the above information pertains to all the pet tags. Can all my product descriptions contain that information, or will I need to modify this 100 times for each individual pet tag? I read up a lot on duplicate content so I am slightly confused. Will this hurt my SEO? Thanks, Keith
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ktw0160 -
Google Penalty or Not?
One of my sites I work with got this message: http://www.mysite: Unnatural inbound linksJune 27, 2013 Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to mysite.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site. But, when I got to manual actions it says: Manual Actions No manual webspam actions found. -- So which is it??? I have been doing link removal, but now I am confused if I need to do a reconsideration request or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
Hi, We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case. 1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story. 2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us. Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
How to Optimize Product Page for Better Ranking in Google?
Today, I was searching for product page SEO on Google for better optimization of product pages and category level pages. I want to introduce about my website structure. Root category: http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor Sub category: http://www.vistastores.com/outdoor-umbrellas End level category: http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas Product page: http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas-california-umbrella-slpt758-f13-red.html I'm doing link building for sub category & end level category page. But, I'm not able to do inbound marketing for product level URLs due to resource problem. But, I have checked that... There are many competitors who are rank well with long trail keyword... I'm selling same product but not ranking well... What is reason behind it? I don't know... Just look at Olefin Red Patio Umbrella search result. I want to rank in top 3 with this kind of long trail keywords... I have made study of following video and article. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ecommerce-seo-making-product-pages-into-great-content-whiteboard-friday http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/in-search-of-the-perfect-seo-product-page/ I have done all things which were described by them... But, I'm still waiting for good ranking...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Redirecting www.example.com to www.example.com/directory/
Hi All, There's been some internal debate going back and forth about redirecting the homepage of a site to a directory. There are a few different POVs circulating, one of which is that it's no different than redirecting to a /index page. Basically, the homepage is ranking for the keyword that we want the directory to rank for but I can't seem to justify placing this type of redirect. The content on both pages is different, but for the term both the homepage and the directory make sense to rank. Has anyone ever done anything like this before? Can anyone see any reason to do something like this? I believe this move would dilute the link value we currently have going to the homepage and potentially cause us to lose our #2 slot with the homepage in favor of a lower spot with the directory. I'd love to hear any thoughts on this/learn if anyone has experimented with this tactic. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamieCottle280 -
Whats the best way to handle product microformats such as hproduct, goodrelations on ecommerce for Google?
With web3.0 results with microfrmatting showing in google, yahoo etc through reviews, instock, events, sales, pricing etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RampUpInteractive0