Detailed Revisions of Articles coexisting with Automated Description Articles

[antorome]

Hello all,

think per instance in a comparator of cars, motorbikes, etc, where you have dozens of brands, types of cars and motorbikes like diesel or oil, 4x4 vs sport, etc

So, in one part of your site you are reviewing them in detail, explaining everything.

You also have a database with hundreds of models with several specs like top speed, length, engine, etc so you can automatically create an info page for these hundreds of models.

How would you make both of them live together in your website?

If you add the review to the automatted articles, then you would have an unconsistency as you cannot manually review all the products. On the other hand, doing it separetly will lead to a very, very similar title posts and urls (revision vs automated versions).

In my particular case, I just had the revisions until now and my site is developed in Wordpress. I had all the url posts below the home (mysite.com/review-of-car-x-of-brand-y) and now I am going to add the automatted ones and am thinking on place the automatted ones like WP Custom Posts and the url would be mysite.com/cars/description-of-car-x-of-brand-y. But still have the problem with categories, tags, etc, etc

Well, it is long question but what do you think about this?

[antorome]

Ok. I had always wondered how the index,noindes affects to the canonical. And also if the canonical post should be included in the sitemap or not (I think that not according to your last whiteboard friday but again not sure).

Per instance, I published the following post this morning checking what you said

http://www.comparativadebancos.com/mejores-depositos-bancarios-de-marzo-de-2011/

and with a rel=canonical to this that was published at the beginning of the month

http://www.comparativadebancos.com/depositos/marzo/

but then I have the first one in google

http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=mejores+depositos+bancarios+marzo+2011

Currently I rank very well for the reviews, so dont know what will happen with the canonical.

Thanks for your answers!

[randfish]

You probably don't need to worry about the noindex tag, just the rel=canonical should be enough to get the engines recognizing the right page (and I'm not 100% sure how the noindex might interact).

[antorome]

That would been even technically easier to implement I think.

Just the last thing, I am confused with the canonical here. What should i use in the blog reviews?

1. meta=Noindex,follow and rel=canonical to the product page

2. meta=Index,follow and rel=canonical to the product page

I dont know if I have to index those posts.

Thanks!

[randfish]

Hmm... I'm not sure I like that as much as getting the product page indexed and known by the engines as the canonical version. Perhaps you could produce the RSS feed/blog with the reviews, but use rel="canonical" on those pages to point over to the product pages which include the reviews? That would be a way to potentially have your cake and eat it too

[antorome]

HI Rand and thanks for your answer and your link.

I believe that is the way to go but the point is that my site is a blog based one and then I am going to introduce a comparator with a huge product database. Therefore, I still would like to display in my home my reviews that then are automatically sent in my daily mailchimp rss newsletter and to my rss suscribers. That was my point of having two separated posts.

Thinking about it, I think this could be a solution:

1. Use a custom taxonomy as Justin Tadlock recommends http://justintadlock.com/archives/2011/01/14/rethinking-how-news-themes-work

2. Display in the home just the posts with the "Review" property and using the dhtml script you said above or a "more text" hiding the "automatted content"

What do you think about this?

Thanks a lot

Antonio

[randfish]

Hi Antonio - a lot of sites, particularly in the e-commerce field, face precisely this issue. What I've seen be most effective is what Amazon, BestBuy and many others do, which is to create a single page for any product and include editorial/user reviews and more detailed information when it's available and when it's not, leave that area open for future additions of content. This way, you have a single version of any given page and you create a positive association with the crawlers and humans that some/much/most of your content/products will eventually get a good, rich description.

You can also use Saibose's suggestion in combination if you'd prefer having this content in separate, embedded "tabs" on the page that all resolve to the same URL. Check out a code sample and example of this in action here - http://dhtmlkitchen.com/scripts/tabs/tutorial/navigation.jsp

Best of luck!
Rand

[antorome]

But I will always have more automatted than custom so i think that "vice versa" is not an option.

Anyhow, I don't really see how to do it in WP? Do you have any idea?

Are there any other suggestions in the room?

Thanks saibose for your advice

[saibose]

put the reviews in # for now till you have a good content base and then carefully do the flip to vice versa.

sorry, my bad, I meant, noindex for tags and categories.

[antorome]

What is exactly your proposal? To just have the automatted ones and in # the review or the opposite?

Anyhow, the point is that I might have 1000 automated posts and 100 custom posts. If I use the # the users wouldn't know how to reach those posts with the custom review.

The reviews can be up to seven or eight paragraphs so it would really make a difference between those which do have it and don't. Therefore, I had thought on doing it separetly, like two different kind of posts.

Finally, for categories and tags, did you want to say "noindex" instead of "nofollow"?

Thanks

[saibose]

what about adding a # in the URL? Have you thought about that? That will drive all the authority to the page you want to rank higher in search.

I dont recall the video, but there was a talk that search engines disregard the part of URL after #, but crawls them.(correct me if i mis interpreted the video, or didnt recall it correctly).

But, that should be a solution to your problem.

Further you can add nofollow to your category and tag pages, if you want faceted navigation and content duplication issues to be solved.