Google crawling item page reviews

[znotes]

Hi Moz community,

I've been trying to do some on-site work and noticed that our product pages reviews may not be totally optimized. It used to be that all of the text from the reviews appeared in the actual code of the page, but now none of that text appears, so it may not be getting crawled.  The change was most likely released when we had an item page redesign.  However, when I Google a review snippet, it does seem to come up, so maybe Google is crawling that data despite it not being SEO optimized.

Is this really an issue if the review snippets are showing up in search, there's been a lot of talk that Google is now better at crawling javascript.

Thanks

[BritneyMuller]

Hi Zach,

Your review markup is showing up in Google but not your actual web page? Could you please link to an example?

Is the issue that you like the review snippet to also show up within your site?

Thanks,

B

[seoman10]

It could be that the search engine cache the content from when it was there.  You could submit the page for reindexing and see what happens but you do risk losing your page position.

The honest answer is that I don't know, but it is definitely in the search engine interest to look at JavaScript content, it is used widely now for content and is sometimes used to trick the search bots.  I wouldn't be at all surprised if your site is fast enough loading the JavaScript that search engines would potentially look at it.

However, it would definitely be better if it was hard code on the page.

[znotes]

Hi Britney,

Thanks for your response, here's an example of an item page:

http://www.uncommongoods.com/product/intersection-of-love-photo-print

I want to make sure that the new way we've set up the reviews don't interfere with Google being able to crawl our review content. We used to have our review text coded in our page code and I was certain Google could crawl our reviews section to gather out user generated content. Now that our page is using JavaScript it might be harder for Google to crawl....When I Google any snippet from a review it shows up in search so it seems like this isn't really a problem?

[BritneyMuller]

Google's structured testing tool is showing an error in your markup: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommongoods.com%2Fproduct%2Fintersection-of-love-photo-print

I've also seen plenty of pages properly marked up with Review Markup and G chooses not to use the review snippet.

In your case, because you're using an aggregate review, I would suggest looking here for more info as well: https://schema.org/AggregateRating.

Hope this helps,

B

[znotes]

Ok, so you're saying we should have the right markup for our aggregate reviews but that even with the correct markup Google might ignore this anyway? I was told that our reviews helped boost our rankings in the past when we implemented them years ago. But then again this could be the fact that it was new then and we've had reviews on our site for ages now.

Thanks!

[BritneyMuller]

Yes, but you currently have an error in your markup, so Google is not rendering it properly. Please see link above. On-site review markup does not necessarily boost rankings, but can help with CTRs, etc.

But yes, even with the right markup for aggregate, Google could choose to ignore it.

The best way to influence rankings (specifically for local) is to have customers review your business on local review sites(Google +, Yelp, etc.) these do help to naturally increase your local search rankings over time.

Hope this helps,

B

[znotes]

Thanks for being so thorough with your answer!

I'll have our tech team take a look at the markup. We used to have our review content embedded as part of the html code and I've heard that increases crawl frequency and was also easy for search engines to understand. Now I think we  might be using AJAX which apparently causes confusion for crawl bots.