How to get user genreated reviews indexed properly?
-
We are currently working to improve the deployment of a review widget on our website. The widget was deployed about 18 months ago and all reviews are behind Java navigation. I have been working with our IT staff to get the reviews into an HTML page which will either live on the product page as a tab or will be a link from the product page.
Our IT staff has suggested leaving the Java navigation for users and creating separate HTML pages specifically for search engines. Based on my experience, this sounds like a bad idea, basically creating pages just for search engines that will not be use by site visitors, although the visitors will have access to the same content via the Java navigation.
Anyone care to comment on this? Is creating HTML pages specifically for search engines a bad idea? An acceptable idea?
-
They should be indexable on the same page. Reviews are very important to improve your rankings, and by creating two pages, you're essentially splitting your link juice. Plus, if your product information goes on those review pages, Google might look at it like duplicate content and consider both pages the same thing. I think it's always a bad idea to create separate pages for bots and people. If you must create two pages, you can use the canonical tag (if both pages populate the same info, minus reviews) to help clarify things. But your best choice for SEO is to have one page.
-
It's hard to tell what you mean by "java navigation". That could be a lot of different things, so I'll just say this:
Everything relevant to a particular topic on one page. A product, for example:
The pictures are all on that page, the description is on that page, and reviews are on that page, everything. You can use navigational aids like accordions, or tabs using javascript as long everything for that item is on one page. No asynchronous loading, or iframes. No mess, no fuss. It's all right there for customers or search engines to find. Masking your content to weed out search engines for customers is definitely a detrimental strategy.
Plus, why in the world can't they just include the reviews on the product page? I am confused at how that is difficult. I will NEVER use AJAX for loading mission-critical content. Even if it's just our twitter feed. I use it for sending and receiving data, and loading in components like notifications or non-critical functionality.
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
-
Website homepage temporarily getting removed from google index
hi, website: www.snackmagic.com The home page goes out of google index for some hours and then comes back. We are not sure why our home page is getting de-indexed temporarily. This doesn't happen with other pages on our website. This has been happening intermittently in the gap of 2-3 days. Any inputs will be very useful for us to debug this issue Thanks
Technical SEO | | manikbystadium0 -
Submitting a new sitemap index file. Only one file is getting read. What is the error?
Hi community, I am working to submit a new a new sitemap index files, where about 5 50,000 sku files will be uploaded. Webmasters is reporting that only 50k skus have been submitted. Google Webmasters is accepting the index, however only the first file is getting read. I have 2 errors and need to know if this is the reason that the multiple files are not getting uploaded. Errors: | 1 | | Warnings | Invalid XML: too many tags | Too many tags describing this tag. Please fix it and resubmi | | 2 | | Warnings | Incorrect namespace | Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn't properly declare the namespace. | 1 | Here is the url I am submitting: http://www.westmarine.com/sitemap/wm-sitemap-index.xml | 1 | | | | |
Technical SEO | | mm9161570 -
What is the best practice to re-index the de-indexed pages due to a bad migration
Dear Mozers, We have a Drupal site with more than 200K indexed URLs. Before 6 months a bad website migration happened without proper SEO guidelines. All the high authority URLs got rewritten by the client. Most of them are kept 404 and 302, for last 6 months. Due to this site traffic dropped more than 80%. I found today that around 40K old URLs with good PR and authority are de-indexed from Google (Most of them are 404 and 302). I need to pass all the value from old URLs to new URLs. Example URL Structure
Technical SEO | | riyas_
Before Migration (Old)
http://www.domain.com/2536987
(Page Authority: 65, HTTP Status:404, De-indexed from Google) After Migration (Current)
http://www.domain.com/new-indexed-and-live-url-version Does creating mass 301 redirects helps here without re-indexing the old URLS? Please share your thoughts. Riyas0 -
Am I doing SEO test properly?
Hello, I just created a page for researching the impact of social signals on Google ranking (in Italy). Page was not optimized (one internal backlink, no other external/internal links, keyword repeated 4 or 5 + h1 h2, no alt tags), and only social signals are being stimulated (through votes). The domain is 2 months old and is already positioned for few relevant keywords, but from 2 page down. My question is: am I doing right? Is this a good way to proceed? And if not, what I should do instead? Thank you for an advice. Eugenio
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Sill cant seem to get images indexed by Goolge
Hi I've been trying for months now to get our images indexed by Google Would love to know if anyone can see a reason why they haven't here is the sitemap http://www.tidy-books.com/sitemapseosuite/US/sitemapUS2.xml Also 54 pages were submitted but only 9 have been indexed? Any help would be great Thanks
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
How to change noindex to index?
Hey, I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.' How can i change this so my pages get indexed? I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated.. Please let me know Many thanks, Jamie P.s Im using WordPress 3.5 And i have the XML sitemap plugin And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..
Technical SEO | | markgreggs0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of migrating one of our retail sites over to magento. To our horror, we find out today that some pages are already being indexed by Google, and we have started receiving orders through new site. Do you have any suggestions for what may have caused this? Or similarly, what the best solution would be to de-index ourselves? We most recently excluded anything with a certain parameter from robots.txt - could this being implemented incorrectly have caused this issue? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
How to properly abandon mod rewrite?
Hi, We've done mod-rewrite to our .php files to show .htm files several years ago for SEO purposes. My question is, doing this has become a hassle for adding new pages, etc. and I'd like to make a clean break with the .htm and move to their real file names and or directories (e.g. company.htm --> /company/ ). What kind of ranking penalty am I looking at if we switch? We're a small company with billion dollar competitors so a rank loss would be fairly devastating. I assume I'd need to do 301 redirects for all of the old file names (obviously yes for the change from page to directories) but for each individual page? Thanks, Matt
Technical SEO | | mynewco0