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
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Mobile site not getting indexed
My site is www.findyogi.com - a shopping comparison site The mobile site is hosted at m.findyogi.com I fixed my sitemap and attribution to mobile site in May last week. My mobile site pages are getting de-indexed since then. Website - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - indexed Mobile - m.findyogi.com/mobiles/motorola/motorola-moto-g-16gb-b95ef8/price - _not indexed. _ Google is crawling my website and mobile site normally. What am I am doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | namansr0 -
Site getting referral traffic from its self
Buon giorno from zero degrees C freezing fog Wetherby UK On this site http://www.collegeofphlebology.com i ran a referral report via Google Analytics and was surprised ro see referral traffic being counted from its own url, illustration here http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/referral-anomoly.jpg So my question is please how can a site get referral traffic from the same url? Grazie Tanto, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Site not indexing correctly
I am trying to figure out what is going on with my site listings. Google is only displaying my title and url - no description. You can see it when you search for Franchises for Sale. The site is www.franchisesolutions.com. Why could this happen? Also I saw a big drop off in a handful of keyword rankings today. Could this be related?
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions0 -
Get to the top of Google in 30 days?
I see on sites like scriptlance where webmasters post a project for SEO services and bidders offering their services to get you to the top of Google in 30 days. Is that out of the question or is it reasonable because they use a service like SEOMoz?
Technical SEO | | webtarget0 -
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 -
Getting rid of low quality
If I wanted to get rid of a batch of low quality pages from the index, Is the best practise to let them 404 and remove them from sitemap files? Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Google indexing page with description
Hello, We rank fairly high for a lot of terms but Google is not indexing our descriptions properly. An example is with "arnold schwarzenegger net worth". http://www.google.ca/search?q=arnold+schwarzenegger+net+worth&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a When we add content, we throw up a placeholder page first. The content gets added with no body content and the page only contains the net worth amount of the celebrity. We then go back through and re-add the descriptions and profile bio shortly after. Will that affect how the pages are getting indexed and is there a way we can get Google to go back to the page and try to index the description so it doesn't just appear as a straight link? Thanks, Alex
Technical SEO | | Anti-Alex0