Detailed Revisions of Articles coexisting with Automated Description Articles
-
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?
-
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!
-
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).
-
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!
-
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
-
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
-
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 -
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
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 QA automation of large websites
Can you share your experiences in managing SEO QA automation of large websites with millions of pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | terentyev
what are the things you are regularly testing for, besides the most obvious - hreflangs/canonicals, robots.txt, sitemap, non-200 status codes, redirect rules?
do you use in-house developed tools or external tools?
if external - which ones?
how do you run your QA automation scripts? external server or some online tools? upon every release or hourly/daily/monthly?0 -
Tool to identify if meta description are showing?
Hi we have a Ecommerce client with 1000s of meta descriptions, we have noticed that some meta descriptions are not showing properly, we want to pull and see which ones are showing on Google SERP results. You can use tools like screaming frog to pull meta description from page, but we want to see if it's showing for certain keywords. Any ideas on how to automate this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianna00 -
Should we add Schema.org for Website Articles on our blog page
Hi All, We use schema.org on most of our eCommerce website apart from on our "latest news/blog section" which we have all our how to's ...and other useful articles on . Am I missing a trick here ?.. I have found there is a https://schema.org/Article which I guess we could implement if it's a big help or if there's a better one ? Just wondered peoples thought as whether it is must have from an SEO/ranking point of view thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Utf-8 symbols in the Title or Meta Description?
Has somebody any experience (pros or cons) to using utf-8 symbols in the Title or in the Meta Description tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yosef
Expedia uses it:
http://prntscr.com/74ofrv 74ofrv0 -
Search Results not Updating (Title, Description, and URL)
Issue: I recently discovered that my site was accessible by both HTTP and HTTPS. The site has used a rel canonical tag to point to the HTTP version. Google+ was pointing to HTTPS though. The title, description, and URL shown in the results for the homepage is HTTPS, other pages are HTTP, etc... Steps taken to Resolve: This week I did the following... 301'd all non-checkout pages to the HTTP version Switched Google+ URL to HTTP version and added new post with an HTTP link to the homepage. Used webmaster tools to recrawl and reindex the site Resubmitted XML Sitemap No luck... the site is still not updating... any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all! Site is Here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AhlerManagement0 -
Do links to Blog articles help that much?
So here's my question/scenario.. When it comes to link-building, I'm noticing a trend that goes like this: If you have a website like www.insurancelondonontario.com and you want to rank highly for the target phrase 'insurance london ontario', you need to get links with that anchor-text pointing to the index page, which is the page you want to rank for that keyword. But what I'm noticing, is that a lot of link builders use a strategy where they create a good piece of content.. like "10 Ways to Decrease your Car Insurance Premiums" within the blog, and then build links to that article since it's easier as it's a good piece of content. My question is.. how much can this really help you to rank for 'insurance london ontario' if all your doing is building links to that blog article, and not the main page? I know it helps the overall domain authority, but is it enough to get you ranking for your goal phrase, or is it just a supporting method?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Some viagra spammer somehow fooled Google into thinking the title and description metatags of a site pointing to me are about viagra. How did they do that? How do I fix this?
In performing a link: to my site, I found this: Video Of People Using Viagra - Online Drug Store, Guaranteed Shipping <cite>www.planetherbs.com/affiliate-program.html</cite> - Cached -Block all www.planetherbs.com results1 day ago – Video Of People Using Viagra. Online Drug Store, Guaranteed Shipping. Check Order Status. Natural and healthy products! If you go to that url, you will see it's just an affiliate program page. Some viagra spammer somehow changed the title and description metatags that google sees (not actually) and links from what appears to be spammy pages are pointing to me. I don't want to get dinged for this. How do I fix these for myself and planetherbs.com? And how did the spammer do this???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KatMouse0 -
Is article writing and submission for link building a good idea in all circumstances?
I'm attempting to build links for a seafood market / restaurant and I'm finding my creativity and knowledge of SEO being stretched, which is a good thing of course. Can you help me grow here? I have the client interested in writing articles but he has little time for this. I want to make sure it is worth it. Is article writing and submission worth the time and effort for a business like this? How would I go about link building though articles for a small business like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0