Rankings drop - we've added user reviews, are they causing over optimisation on page?
-
Hello
Hopefully can get a few opinions on this.
We've added some user reviews to our website for key products. We added these approximately 3-4 weeks ago. In the last week we've seen keyword rankings drop on the pages they've been added to.
For example see: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/wildlife/primates.aspx
This page ranked well for both gorilla safari and gorilla safaris but both terms have dropped considerably (12 to 20 checking Google UK on the Moz rank checker). Due to the formatting required for the Rich Snippets (and we have the user review stars in the SERPS) the term "Gorilla safari" is perhaps becoming a bit spammy on the page.
Another example would be "Borneo holidays" (up and down in the SERPS between 12-18) on this page: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/far-east/borneo.aspx
Do you feel that these fluctuations in keyword ranking could be to do with this?
Thanks
-
I think that over the past few weeks search traffic itself has declined a little, that is what I meant.
I don't think the age will matter. It will help in the users eyes to show longevity. I have reviews from 1999 on my site
-
Hi Monica and thank you.
Our site is cached pretty regularly, last done 10 Dec 2014 03:29:11 GMT. The decrease in rankings ties into the subsequent loss of traffic. Our rankings are fluctuating a lot though.
Some of our reviews are a few years old, do you think that this would put off current users or do you think the value of the date tag to Google is the higher priority in this instance?
Since the disavow we have built in a number of new, good quality links but I will look at the link neighborhoods to see if anything stands out.
-
Kate,
I honestly do not believe that there is anything to worry about here. It sounds like there was a decrease in search traffic and that is all that has affected your rankings.
Do you know how to find a cached copy of your page? It will tell you the last time it was crawled. Before you do anything else, see if you can add the date and place of origin to the reviews.
If you had a manual penalty from Penguin 2.0 or 2.1 the 3.0 update should have removed any negative effects if the clean up was done properly. Since this update is rolling out at snails pace, it is possible there was a small change that affected your rankings.
After your disavow and link clean up did you build any new, quality, relevant links? Do you have a social presence and allow people to share your images and pages socially? Can any of your existing links maybe have a no so clean link profile? 3.0 really targeted link neighborhoods, which means you could be guilty by association. Take a look at GWT and see what the links to your site looks like. Use OSE to see if there is anything new you may have over looked.
Your on page optimization looks pretty good. If you haven't refreshed your link profile with new links, or, aren't using social media a lot, you could suffer the same amount of rankings loss. SEO isn't successful unless both the on page and off page op are working together.
-
Just a side thought - I'm not sure what the page speed was prior to the decline, but it's pretty slow at the moment. So that won't be doing you any favours
-
Thanks again for everyone adding their thoughts.
The traffic decline seems to have come about since Thursday 4th December. We did well out of the Penguin 3.0 update, having previously been negatively affected (link clean up and disavow put in place earlier this year). Our ranking on important terms have dropped below their pre-Penguin 3.0 uplift now though.
Our keywords have continued to drop again today with several showing a loss of 7-10 places (on top of previous drops).
I did test the expanding panels and found that Google did seem to be indexing the content okay. I have tried making one of the reviews panels permanently expanded to see if it makes a difference though but still worry it just makes the page look very spammy as the keyword is the same as the item being reviewed, so is repeated numerous times on the page.
Any further thoughts?
Thanks,
Kate -
"may not' be indexed is the key term there. More likely than not, it is being indexed.
-
According to John Meuller, any content that is only visible to a user after they have clicked a tab, button or link may not be indexed.
-
That isn't true in this case because the reviews themselves are clearly seen in the source code. It can be fully crawled by robots, therefore it is being indexed.
-
Keep in mind that there was holiday week in there too. The trend usually includes a decrease in search traffic the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other major holidays. If you get a large amount of traffic from the US the change in your rankings could just be due to the decrease in traffic and Google shaking the rankings up a little bit because of the change. Your CTR might have been lower because of the position change, but if your SERPs were still getting clicks at position 20, then you should see your results pop back up. Those clicks tell Google that your SERP is relevant to the searcher and could cause them to go back up.
I say add the day, city and state of where the reviews came from. That is very important.
Since this is related to content and not to any nefarious link building, I would look at the Panda updates and not Penguin. If you really think it could be Penguin then check your GWT account for any jumps in links or messages from the spam team.
It isn't uncommon after you make a change to see your results go backwards. I think that if after this week and possibly next week you don't see any progress, you should remove the reviews, wait a couple of weeks and see what happens. If your rankings go back up, then the problem is the reviews. If not, there is something else going on.
-
You mention in the last week, Penguin has been drunkenly stumbling around messing with most SERPs as seen here - http://algoroo.com/ and here - http://searchengineland.com/holidays-google-breaks-updates-rules-gives-fresh-penguin-updates-210367
Could it be due to this?
-
As already said, it's unlikely these comments are negatively affecting the page. Moreover, Google's John Meuller intimated that hidden content within 'click to expand' style boxes is not indexed. With this in mind, only the most recent review will be looked at by Google.
-
Sorry I forgot to add, we have seen some decrease in CTR but this corresponds to the decrease in ranking so I would expect the CTR to be lower at #20 than #12 for example?
-
Hi all
Thank you for your responses, I appreciate you taking the time to look at our website.
I'm glad that the general consensus is that the user reviews are good content, all the review content should be accessible to Google bot and isn't hidden at source level, it's just behind an expanding panel to stop the page becoming too long. We'll look at rewording the first paragraph to make sure it is very specific to the reviews on that page and won't appear as review spam.
The reviews are all genuine - it is a concern that that may appear otherwise; we may have to look again at whether to include dates. The reviews we receive are generally really positive, which from a company perspective is great, but I can understand why users may be skeptical.
If the fluctuating keyword rankings for these pages aren't connected to the new reviews then I'm not sure what else could be causing it - Penguin 3.0 related updates?
-
On a first look I would propose that the following paragraph just before the reviews themselves is problematic:
_"Natural World Safaris tailor-make gorilla safari holidays to meet your requirements. This gives you complete flexibility and allows you to choose your preferred travel dates, areas you wish to visit and the standard of accommodation that suits your style and budget. Please see below reviews from clients who have returned from our gorilla tracking safari holidays." _
Try rewriting that or removing that. Your page is already über-optimised and the first sentence is just over-the-top keyword stuffing. Also rethink hiding your reviews behind a plus button. Because the reviews are hidden as secondary content the Google bot sees the above paragraph as the same review for all the different pages. Thus thinks this is review spam across your otherwise very beautiful and, again, extremely optimised pages.
It is reasonable to expect that Google will want to combat review spam since many people use review mark-up for nefariously ranking higher.
-
I agree with Monica, it's seems unlikely that adding user reviews would affect your rankings in a negative way.
Did you also notice a decrease in traffic on these pages?That been said, I don't doubt the quality of the products you offer, but to be very honest, the reviews look a bit fake (they are all very positive, there is no date on the reviews), and apart from the two you mentioned, I don't find a lot of other reviews on the site (first 10 pages of site:www.naturalworldsafaris.com reveal maybe 5/6 holidays with reviews, and then it's minimum 3 reviews). Don't think this would have an impact on the search results, but probably something to think about for your human visitors
-
In my opinion, this is highly unlikely. User reviews are the holy grail of on page content.
I would check GWT to see if you have had a decrease in CTR organically. This can temporarily effect your rankings. What other changes have you made to these pages? It could just take another week or too for the page to be crawled and indexed properly. When is the last time these pages were cached?
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
-
Page not ranking because of React.js ?
Hey guys, I'm struggling with this part of my website which uses react.js . My developers used this saying it's much better and much quicker (which I think so too) but we have really low traffic coming from google compared to the other parts of the website (not using react.js). Moz gives me a score of 85% for the page but we get less than 100 visits / day and we were targeting 10.000 visits/day giving the traffic of this section in our competitors website (our whole website has 60.000 visits / day). (Section is online since 3 months now) Can you help me see what is wrong there ? I'm in Belgium so we have the website in 3 languages (FR/NL/EN) but the most important ones are FR & NL. FR : https://gocar.be/fr/prix-voitures-neuves/Audi/A3/A3-Sportback/1-0-TFSI_39CER NL : https://gocar.be/nl/prijzen-nieuwe-wagens/Audi/A3/A3-Sportback/1-0-TFSI_39CER EN : https://gocar.be/en/price-new-cars/Audi/A3/A3-Sportback/1-0-TFSI_39CER Main competitors having a better ranking than us (exemple in FR) : https://www.moniteurautomobile.be/modele--audi--a3/prix.html https://www.vroom.be/fr/prix/audi-a3/citadine-2012/197 Cheers ! Jean-Philippe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gocar_be0 -
Rankings Continue To Drop
Hi there I'm at wits end trying to stop the slow bleed in our rankings to our store URL's that started mid March 2017 and continues through to today. I'd appreciate some pointers and hope this will throw up a challenge to someone out there. Here is the background: 1. We run an e-commerce store on Shopify with a blog. The recent ranking decline has been almost entirely on the store URL's (catalogue and product pages) while at the same time we have seen steady growth in search volumes in the blog - this makes me think we are seeing a Penguin4 penalty of some type, because the impact is confined to the store URLs. 2. We received a linked based manual penalty back in 2014 and this was successfully removed within 3 months. We have quite a large disavow file as a result. 3. Shortly after launch of Penguin 4.0 in Sept/Oct 2016 we saw a really nice boost in traffic and ascribed this to being under a previous Penguin algo penalty, now removed. 4. Come March 2017 we see a small but steady weekly drop in rankings for our store URL's only, this steady drop continues through to today and over time has become significant. Approximately a 50% decline in visitor numbers to store URL's only as of today, since March. All of this despite: a. Initially I thought this was a Panda issue (because it seemed to coincide with Panda releases in March and May) so the entire website has been rewritten (during June and July) with thin content removed across the store and the blog. Remaining content has been given a serious content boost, being very careful to watch for over-optimisation, and for keyword cannibalisation. I think I've got this right. There are also no crawl issues being highlighted by Moz Pro or SEMRush site audits. b. Recently discovered, only last week in fact. A very low domain website, trust score (0 and 0) had been copying our blog articles steadily on a weekly basis, starting Oct 2016 (yes same time as Penguin4) and only caught last week (my fault for missing this). These articles were copied verbatim with all links and so generated nearly 400 spammy backlinks to our store URLs (about 30% of all the links we have). I've had all these articles removed from the spammy site via DMCA so none of those links exist anymore (as of 8/14/17). I've also disavowed this domain with Google. Could these spam links be the issue, and Google is still needing to crawl this site to see the links are no longer there? I'm not sure because my understanding is that Penguin4 would have devalued these links to start? c. A general review of links and anchor text. I've used Moz Pro and SEMRush backlink audit (linked to Google Search Console) and have removed all toxic links by contacting web masters and using Google disavow. This included removing any links that I think are causing over optimised anchor text. After disavow, according to SEMRush, we have no toxic backlinks left and only 50 out of 1200 links with "Money" anchor text. This exercise was completed two days ago when the last disavow file was uploaded. However I don't believe there was an issue here before as toxic links were < 1% of all links and exact match "money" anchor text in the region of 5%. d. One potential problem with our backlinks is that we have quite a few high domain/high trust links to our scholarship page with anchor text "official website". The net result is that our "Other" anchor text category is just over 50% of total links - these are mainly educational institutions with .edu domains. e. A review of internal linking. We had some what I would refer to as SEO links, linking all product and collection pages across the store, through a tagging type system. This was removed two days ago as it was probably unnecessary for user experience. Other than this I have two concerns remaining with our internal linking structure. The first is that we have quite a big static navigation on the left margin of our store collection pages. This is not faceted navigation, but static. The second is that we've internally linked from almost every blog to our "key" money page in the store, however with varied and non-money anchor text. f. There is nothing in Google Search Console indicating a problem, no manual actions, no significant HTML improvements, and Google has indexed over 90% of URL's compared to the sitemap. All broken links have been fixed - there were a lot before but all fixed as of three weeks ago. g. Checking site speed in GA. Speed has remained constant over the period and we have put in some fixes to improve it. Site speed has not got worse and scores average in Googles speed checker. That's about it. It's possible that with the recent changes made with respect to b, c, e and f above I just need to wait a couple more weeks for Google to catch up, and would appreciate thoughts on this. However I'd also like some thoughts on the static navigation on our collection pages, plus importantly on linking from blog articles to mostly a single money page in the store - of all that remains I think this is potentially a problem. Our website is located at www.thekewlshop.com Many thanks for your help. Charles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | charlesfitz0 -
Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website?
Hi, Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Rankings rise after improving internal linking - then drop again
I'm working on a large scale publishing site. I can increase search rankings almost immediately by improving internal linking to targeted pages, sometimes by 40 positions but after a day or two these same rankings drop down again, not always as low as before but significantly lower than their highest position. My theory is that the uplift generated by the internal linking is subsequently mitigated by other algorithmic factors relating to content quality or site performance or is this unlikely? Does anyone else have experience of this phenomenon or any theories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hjsand1 -
After adding a ssl certificate to my site I encountered problems with duplicate pages and page titles
Hey everyone! After adding a ssl certificate to my site it seems that every page on my site has duplicated it's self. I think that is because it has combined the www.domainname.com and domainname.com. I would really hate to add a rel canonical to every page to solve this issue. I am sure there is another way but I am not sure how to do it. Has anyone else ran into this problem and if so how did you solve it? Thanks and any and all ideas are very appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LovingatYourBest0 -
Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's
I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets 1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/ 2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/ The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down... .com/shop/wiget/color/shape/ The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc. Here are my questions. 1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer? 2. Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page? 3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page. I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying. As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets. Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SKP0 -
Sudden drop in ranking for major search terms
Site bumpbabyandbeyond com au. Help! We have been operating for six years and had steadily built up our ranking for major terms like maternity clothes, maternity clothing, maternity wear, reaching highs of 6, 8 and 10 respectively for AU sites AU wide about six months ago that we have steadily maintained. All of a sudden we have dropped away. A week ago I noticed we had dropped from 6 to 12 for maternity clothes. This morning we are 21! I can't see any obvious reason for this, but believe the eCommerce module of our inventory/pos software has had a recent update - I'm awaiting answers on this. We haven't actively had anyone link building or working on SEO after being badly bitten and shelling out a small fortune for an AU company to do very little over six months - rankings improved rapidly when I sacked them and did some on page minor work myself. But I don't have the time or knowledge to look after the seo, and am on the hunt for reputable white hat assistance. Is there anything obviously wrong that I need to fix ASAP? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | catfree0 -
Dynamic 301's causing duplicate content
Hi, wonder if anyone can help? We have just changed our site which was hosted on IIS and the page url's were like this ( example.co.uk/Default.aspx?pagename=About-Us ). The new page url is example.co.uk/About-Us/ and is using Apache. The 301's our developer told us to use was in this format: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/Default.aspx$
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoGroup51
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^pagename=About-Us$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/About-Us/ [R=301,L] This seemed to work from a 301 point of view; however it also seemed to allow both of the below URL's to give the same page! example.co.uk/About-Us/?pagename=About-Us example.co.uk/About-Us/ Webmaster Tools has now picked up on this and is seeing it a duplicate content. Can anyone help why it would be doing this please. I'm not totally clued up and our host/ developer cant understand it too. Many Thanks0