BazaarVoice Paginated Reviews Not Honoring Canonical & Indexing Multiple Pages

[Eroc]

If there are enough reviews on a product page to warrant page 2, 3 etc, BazaarVoice appends the below snippets to each new page of reviews, which are then also indexed, despite BazaarVoice SEO settings that automate a canonical tag (seemingly since the differing reviews on each page are not similar enough to honor the canonical).

• <cite class="iUh30">?bvstate=pg:2/ct:r</cite>
• <cite class="iUh30">?bvstate=pg:3/ct:r</cite>

It seems Target.com has found a way to hack the BV code to create a dedicated page to view all reviews:

• https://www.target.com/p/ultra-soft-fitted-sheet-300-thread-count-threshold-153/-/A-13973172?showOnlyReview=true

While Ikea.com blocks it in the Robots file (defeats SEO value) -

• Noindex: */catalog/products/bvroute=Review Noindex: */catalog/products/bvtab

Tons of brands apparently have the issue, and you can see more examples if you search "inurl:bvstate=pg"

Anyone aware of a solution to this?

[Asif.Dilshad]

Hi Eroc,

I don’t see any value throwing review content by blocking in robots.txt, (no offence to IKEA ). I recommend to configure product pages as it won’t generate pagination issue for having too many reviews.

It can handled by loading all comments on same product page (till load time won’t hurt) and display to user in chunks (without changing the url). If your page support 50 reviews (without hurting load time) remove the “Add Review” button after 50 review’s so you won’t receive new review’s or add moderation  to simply chose which 50 comments you want to show because every review will not have same impact (and good enough to publish :P).

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Eroc,

Yep, this is a super common issue for SEOs. My company's site has reviews load in JavaScript, and Google even crawls and indexes those as if they're separate pages.

Google wants to read everything it can, so you've got to figure out the cost/benefit of this situation. If you really do have all of the product information, I'd guess that visitors entering through page 2 of reviews wouldn't be the worst thing, especially since Google would probably choose the page with the reviews most relevant to the query.

The main issue from my perspective is wasting Google's crawl budget on your extra review pages. If that's an issue that will significantly help your site (likely if you have a lot of products), you'll want to noindex those reviews like Ikea. There's no other method that will stop Google from wasting it's crawl budget.

Hope this helps!

Kristina