Would reviews being served to a search engine user agent through a noscript tag (but not shown for other user types) be considered cloaking?

[eTundra]

This one is tough, and I've asked it once here, http://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/Is-having-rich-snippets-placed-below-a-review-that-is-pulled-via-javascript-considered-bad-grey-hat-SEO, but I feel that the response was sided with the company.

As an SEO or digital marketer, it seems that if we are pulling in our reviews via iframe for our users, but serving them through a nonscript tag when the user agent is a search engine, that this could be considered cloaking.

I understand that the "intent" may be to show the same thing to the bots as the user sees, but if you look at the view source, you'll never see the reviews, because it would only be delivered to the search engine bot.

What do you think?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Ah to have 100% guarantees for anything related to SEO.

Alas, that's not the world we live in.  However, we can apply critical thinking to each choice and with that, we are more likely to be safe from the wrath of Google.

SO - for this question let's consider the following:

A "Noscript" version of a site is designed first and foremost for people who have scripts turned off, including those who have browsers set up for either security reasons or for visual impairment needs.

So if you provide content within a noscript block that essentially mirrors what visitors get when scripts are turned on, you are not likely in violation of any Google cloaking policy.

Cloaking comes into play when you generate content purely for Googlebot exclusively or Googlebot and Bingbot.

So if the content you are provided via that zip file (which I assume you then need to manually cut and paste into the noscript portion of the code) is pure content and not over-optimized, you can proceed with confidence that you'll be okay.

Where I DO have concern is this:

"The daily snapshot files contain UGC with SEO-friendly markup tags." (emphasis mine).  Exactly what do they mean by that specific wording?  That's the concern point.  Are they referring to proper structured markup for reviews, from Schema.org or at the very least RDFa reviews markup?  If not, that would be problematic because only proper "reviews" specific structured markup should wrap around reviews content.

[TakeshiYoung]

We use BazaarVoice reviews for our ecommerce site too. What we do is right below the iframe reviews, we have a link that says "click here to see more reviews". When you click the link, it opens up a div with the html version of the reviews. So similar idea to what you are proposing, but less "cloaky" than a noscript tag, and it doesn't impact user experience much.

BazaarVoice can also do html reviews that are not iframed if you have a server that can handle server side scripting like PHP (which unfortunately our legacy Yahoo store does not).

[eTundra]

I'm pretty sure that it's structured markup, but I will definitely be double checking before simply guessing on this one!  Thanks Alan.

[eTundra]

Great idea for having a link to an html version.  How do you keep those updated?  Is it manual? And do you just block the pages that they create over on the review.mysite.com sub-domain?

That is actually where we started looking at fixing things.  I see that sub-domain they created as basically competing with our product pages.  Why would that ever be the way a business would want to operate their site, it doesn't make sense to do that.  But all I keep hearing is name drops of big brands.  It's frustrating really.

[TakeshiYoung]

Yes, we manually bulk upload the HTML reviews every couples weeks or so to keep them fresh. We also had BV noindex the review.subdomain so that it wasn't competing with us in the SERPs (have them add a noindex tag in the header as well as your Google Webmaster Tools verification code, so you can instantly deindex all the pages).

[eTundra]

That sounds like the answer Takeshi!  We were worried about manually doing it because the user wouldn't see their reviews instantly, but with how you're doing it, it doesn't matter, and (like you said) it shouldn't muddy the user experience.

Are you referring to the "Remove URLs" tool in Google Webmaster for deindexing?

[TakeshiYoung]

Yup. Once you have the GWT verification in the header, you should be able to deindex the entire subdomain instantly.

[eTundra]

Perfect!  Thanks again for the follow-up!

[eTundra]

Alright, this is where we are with this.  What Takeshi recommended is a work around.  Yes, it works, but it takes more man hours to constantly upload the info.  If someone wanted to do this more seamlessly, how could we do that?  I don't have an answer quite yet (but wanted to post our follow-up in case someone else stumbles upon this Q&A), but we're going to the company with these questions:

• We need someone on the phone that understands SEO and the BV installation on our site being SEO friendly; i.e. not a developer that knows about implementing BV, but an SEO person that understands the difference between cloaking and duplicate content with product pages.
• We want to know how we can get our product reviews on our product pages that can be seen in the html of the page; i.e. I can view source and see the review content there.  This is inline with Takeshi's work around, but is there an easier way to do this where it's automatic?
• Having the reviews sent over via javascript when the bot requests the info seems to be inline with cloaking behavior that is considered bad with the search engines.
• We don’t want to add a ~1.5 second delay to getting the info pulled over for the bots to see it, as this will increase our PageSpeed.  However, this seems to be the next best solution for getting up-to-date reviews in the code of the product page.

I know, not every tool is perfect, but if there is a gap here, I'd imagine that one of largest companies in review management would be able to tackle this - don't you think?

To me, this feels like our content is being hi-jacked.  I have my reviews in iframes (sort of speak) on my product pages, but also at reviews.mysite.com/product-reviews, which is essentially duplicating my product pages... we're competing with ourselves.  Is the best fix to NOINDEX that subdomain and not let the reviews be seen at all, or keep the pages up and just compete with ourselves in the SERPs?  Or is there an easy way to get those reviews (our reviews) seen on our site from users and bots?

[TakeshiYoung]

BV does provide a newer format for their reviews, if your server allows server side scripting such as PHP. I believe it's called "Cloud SEO". This is the simplest solution.

If you can't run PHP, then I would recommend talking to YourStoreWizards (http://www.yourstorewizards.com/). They provide customized solutions that can automate the data pulling and updating process.

As far as reviews.mysite.com, you want to get that de-indexed as soon as you get the HTML reviews on your site. Otherwise, not only will the subdomain compete with your main site for traffic, bu tall the reviews on your site will be seen as duplicate content.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I can't speak to the BV implementation aspect as I have no experience with it, however I will echo and agree with Takeshi on the other points as they are the best practice scenario