Are the pages useful to the user? Do you expect users to actively use these pages on your site? Do you want users to be able to find these pages when they search for their issues through Google?

If you've answered 'yes' to any of these questions, I wouldn't suggest removing them from Google. Instead, take your time and set a schedule to optimize each of these pages.

If these pages are: Not valuable to the user, unnecessary to be indexed by Google, locked behind a membership gate, duplicate pages, thin content - then these would be good reasons to noindex them from all search engines.

If you give me a few of your direct competitors I will do a search to see if they have any inbound affiliate links to their website.

There are not any very effective free solutions that I'm aware of, and hopefully someone can add one here so I do become aware.

However, if you're interested in controlling your affiliate program, than Hasoffers is a great product with a low entry cost. You can also look into the popular affiliate networks, such as Neverblue advertising and Commission Junction.

Also, look at your competitors affiliate programs and see what they are using.

Are you using a WordPress theme or a custom site theme?

Let's use this flow as an example:

User comes to your site and views a product

User submits a review to the product

Manager approves the reviews through the CMS

The review shows up on the product page

When the review shows up on the product page, your site probably generates that once the review is approved by a manager. The site generates some HTML and sticks in the review. That HTML generated should include the schema markup for the review.

Same with your products, if you push a new product into the site it generates a product page. Within that page's template should be the markup auto-generated (if it is built into the theme).

Does that help? You can PM me your site and I will take a look to be more specific.

Your numbers do not need to be manually updated, but they do need to be wrapped in the correct schema in order to be read and updated by Google.

Your site's theme should include the schema markup and whenever a new review is entered the theme would take care of the code behind the scenes.

If you're adding markup manually now, then your theme probably doesn't have the markup built into its code/functionality. In that case, you'd need to adjust your site's theme to include the markup automatically or add a plugin to do so. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools' Data Highlighter to try and have it update automatically (works well if your site is clearly structured).

It's true that it wouldn't matter to the user, such as 'above the fold' real estate. But, to the bots do pay attention to the parts invisible to the user and should be optimized too.

Yeah, maybe not. But, 'above the fold' is understood to be better real estate on a web page - why not higher up on a document too?

Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top?

Yes, location does matter.

Let's consider this extreme scenario: A competitor and you are competing for the same term and have the following...

• The term being targeted is exactly the same
• Both you and your competitors' domain have the same authority
• You both have the same inbound links and internal link structure
• Both properties' content is optimized

Basically, you and your competitor have the same internal/external optimizations - so all other factors are equal aside from the <title>location.</p> <p>Pages are rendered from top to bottom. Crawlers read pages from top to bottom. Your competitors' <title> tag is higher on the page than yours. When Google crawls the site, they understand this (the location of the title tag in relation to the page). How will they decide between your page and your competitors' page? Your competitor puts the title tag up higher on the page than you do, it must be more important.</p> <p>Now, this is a very extreme scenario that is super difficult to replicate (you'd need to control both sites to do it properly). But, using this extreme can show why location of the <title> tag is important. It may be a very slight difference, but sometimes that is all that is needed.</p></title>

Send me a private message with some questions you have and I'd be happy to provide a clear, honest answer.

Hi Shaqd,

I have not personally implemented a thumbs up/down rating system, but have implemented a 5 star rating system.

Since your rating only have two values, either 1 or 2 (1 being thumbs down, 2 being thumbs up), you'll need to specify the Bestrating attribute so Google understands you only have two options.

This is because, by default, Google assumes a 5 star rating system (1-5) if the attribute is not specified.

On this page: http://schema.org/Rating you'll see how to add the bestrating attribute (bestRating)

It would be great if someone could give an example of how that looks in the SERPs too.