Content with changing URL and duplicate content

[Christian_T]

Hi everyone,

I have a question regarding content (user reviews), that are changing URL all the time.

We get a lot of reviews from users that have been dining at our partner restaurants, which get posted on our site under (new) “reviews”.

My worry however is that the URL for these reviews is changing all the time. The reason for this is that they start on page 1, and then get pushed down to page 2, and so on when new reviews come in.

http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser

I’m guessing that this could cause for serious indexing problems? I can see in google that some reviews are indexed multiple times with different URLs, and some are not indexed at all.

We further more have the specific reviews under each restaurant profile. I’m not sure if this could be considered duplicate content?

Maybe we should tell google not to index the “new reviews section” by using robots.txt. We don’t get much traffic on these URLs anyways, and all reviews are still under each restaurant-profile.

Or maybe the canonical tag can be used?

I look forward to your input.

Cheers, Christian

[FedeEinhorn]

Christian,

I just checked your site and I wasn't able to find those URLs that are constantly changing as you mention.

If you are referring to the restaurant order presented on the page changes, that's nothing to worry about. You are just sorting the restaurants by the last review, right?

I wouldn't recommend noindexing the review section, in fact, I would recommend you further improve it using schema.org markup to tell Google what those "comments" are. You can even use GWT Data Highlighter to markup your data automatically (although only Google will know the markup if you use that method).

About the duplicate content, there's also nothing to worry about, as in the homepage you present only 1 review while in the restaurant page you show all of them, so the content is different.

You should also use schema.org markup to let crawlers know business locations, details, etc and what you are actually listing.

Hope that helps!

[Christian_T]

Hi Federico, thanks for the reply.

I will defiantly look into this schema.org that you mention.

Regarding the "Changing URL". The URL stays the same, but the content (reviews) keeps changing URL, as more reviews comes in.

Example:

A new review comes in, let's call it “MOZ”. This gets automatically published as newest review, on the first review page:
http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser

As more new reviews come in, "MOZ" will automatically be "pushed down" to page 2. 
http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser?restaurant=-1&sort=0&page=2

As more come in “MOZ” will be pushed to page 3, and so on, and so on.

So the URL for the “MOZ” review will keep changing, and I’m worried that this solution causes indexing problems!?

Regards, Christian

[Christian_T]

Hi Guys,

I would still love an answer to this!?

Have a great day.

Cheers, Christian

[Everett]

Hello Christian,

You have three choices here, listed in order of preference in my opinion:

#1 View All Canonical - This may not be a good choice for you, however, because there are hundreds of pages of reviews, which may take too long to load on a single page.

#2 Rel Canonical - You are actually already doing this:

#3 Rel Next Prev - This "would" be the ideal fix, but Google doesn't seem to treat it the way they're supposed to.

In summary: I think you're fine the way things are. No need to be concerned here.

[Christian_T]

Hi Everett,

Thanks for the reply, and choices.

We just implemented choice #2, so Im pleased that you think it's a good solution.

Thanks a bunch and have a great weekend .

Cheers, Christian