Will there be an SEO impact if I switch my rich snippets from reviews to votes?
-
So, we currently have rich snippets showing for reviews on our site. We've made some new product pages that have reviews on them, but they are hidden behind a tab. Because of this our rich snippets haven't been showing in the serps, so we've been looking for a way to get them showing for these new pages. What we've found is that we can change the rich snippets from reviews to votes, which will show an aggregate score on the page, and this will get the snippets appearing in serps again as votes.
What we're concerned about is, if we make this change to these new pages, they will automatically change everything on our review pages and all snippets on our sites will change from reviews to votes (not just the new pages). What we want to know is, if we make this change do you think that we may see a negative seo impact (aside from maybe having a lower CTR)?
Thanks!
-
No. it will not affect your organic rankings on Google if you change from reviews to votes. Keep the tab, but add the aggregated ratings on the page. It will be a snapshot of the reviews. and link the snapshot with the tab as well.
Reviews are always better than votes because reviews keep your visitors engage and build trust of your site. They spend time in analyzing/reading the reviews which help them make a decision. Reviews increases your time on site. For example I want to buy shoes and visited a shoe website. I see votes, some are positive or negative but I don't know what's positive / negative about them. But if I get reviews I can specifically see the pros/cons, I get a better insight before coming to a buying decision.
Rich Snippets can have a huge impact on your website’s performance. However I don't see them helping rankings directly but indirectly they help a lot. It can help you see:
1. Better clickthrough rates from search results
2. More qualified traffic and better conversion ratesThey also help you communicate a clear, unique value proposition and establish a competitive advantage.
Google’s ultimate objective is: to create the best search experience for users, so they can find the best, most relevant results. The better Google Search is able to help its users find the best search result before they click through (to ensure that each click is the correct one), the better the experience for their users.
Hope this helps you
-
Great, thanks for the help though!
-
Ok. Well, to answer your original question I don't think the semantic markup will negatively impact your rankings, but it's not the ideal implementation (the rich snippets will say "votes").
-
Yeah, we're definitely not being deceptive, we have a tab that says Reviews which open up when a user clicks on it. We've tested in with this tool but it says it won't show because the text/reviews are hidden to the user, which is why we tested it with a the vote aggregate data and this was the only way we could get it to show...
-
As long as you aren't being deceptive about it, it should still work.
Just put your code into the rich snippet testing tool and see if the semantic markup is implemented properly.
-
We put the new pages up about 6 or 7 weeks ago, so it has been some time now. From looking at the google help page it states under the Aggregate reviews section for count,
"The total number of reviews for the item on your site. Note: Whenever you include
count
, the page must also contain review markup for each reviewed item.count
should only include reviews on your own site."and for vote:
"Specifies the number of people who provided a rating with or without an accompanying review. A page must specify at least one of
count
orvotes
."I could be interpreting this wrong, but I understood it to say that if we're using count for reviews, the reviews need to be visible. If we use votes, they reviews don't need to be visible on the page.
-
How long did you test the aggregate ratings for? It can take a while for Google to catch up. I don't see why votes would work but ratings wouldn't.
-
We've already tried using the aggregate rating on the page from the reviews, but when we do this the snippets won't show in the serps... We also have the option of redesigning the new pages, but it would be an absolute last resort due to lack of resources at this stage.
-
Why would you want to use votes? If the reviews are on a separate tab, why not just include the aggregate rating on the page itself, in order to get the rich snippets showing? You may also be able to implement the tabs in such a way that you still get review snippets.
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
-
SEO & IFrame problem
Hi All, I will try and keep this as simple as possible. My product page links to a separate page with an IFrame, giving my users the option to upload artwork for the product. The IFrame contains the external file upload site (mail big file). When finished, the user can use a button link to return to the product page to continue with their order. As soon as the page with the IFrame was crawled by Google, the IFrame page started to rank in place of where my product page used to rank, yet there is no content on the page relating to my product (just a file upload). So now users are visiting the IFrame via the same query which must be an absolute headache and not useful at all. I have tried the following: 1. Added a line in body text which contains an internal link pointing to the product page using exact match anchor text for the query. (This didn't work) 2. I applied a no index tag to the IFrame, and now my product page is no longer ranking at all. Can anyone help me solve this puzzle. I believe I might be missing something. Kind regards, Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Website analysis for SEO
Hi, We have been trying to gain ranking for 7 keywords for a year now but have been unsuccessful We are not sure where we are going wrong, if someone could please help us out, we are happy to pay for your time.
Technical SEO | | mframing0 -
Changing menus regularly - will this impact SEO
We are working on an internal project, where the website owner is thinking of making regular changes to one or two items on the top level menu. Assuming they redirect the original pages or navigate to them in other ways, is there any other impact on SEO to changing the menu structure? I assume they'd submit new sitemaps after each change. Many thanks Fiona
Technical SEO | | fionah0 -
SEO value of InDesign pages?
Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?
Technical SEO | | TheaterMania1 -
SEO for User Authenticated Content
Hi Everyone - I have a potential client who is seeking SEO for a site that contains about 95% of content only accessible through user authentication . Does anyone have tips for getting this indexed without having to open it up to the public? I was considering adding "snippets" into the robots.txt or creating an additional page with snippets linking to the login page. I'd appreciate any thoughts! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | manutx0 -
Seo Yoast Plugin
In Yoast seo plugin, under the general settings is Sitewide meta settings,under which there is an option to either check or leave unchecked Noindex subpages of archives which says: If you want to prevent /page/2/ and further of any archive to show up in the search results, enable this. I am very confuse if to check or not. What is the best seo practice? Most of our posts are in categories which have 2-4 pages.
Technical SEO | | VillasDiani0 -
Redirecting Domain will cause SEO?
I am redirecting my domain, based on Geo Location. For example : if someone browse from india www.example.com they will redirect to www.example.in Does redirecting domain on Geo based will cause SEO or Any kind of duplicate content issue, as i am using same content on both TLDs.
Technical SEO | | anishtapan0 -
SEO-Friendly FAQ Software
Hi, We use Kayako Supportsuite (help desk and FAQ software) installed on our site and it's causing about 80% of all our SEO errors/issues. I've googled a lot and I can't seem to find a FAQ software (we need the ability to maintain and constantly update a large # of questions) that doesn't have duplication (print version, pdf version of each question, etc.), terrible URL structure and an overall very cheesy look. We don't need the helpdesk part, just FAQ functionality. Anybody have any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mynewco0