Do JSON feed / XML Feeds have any SEO benefits?

[jannkuzel]

We are looking to use a 3rd party customer review provider and I have been told by their rep that it has a feature which allows us to display reviews placed with them about us on our website via JSON feed  or XML feed (I have limited technical knowledge so have no idea what this is but am hoping our developer does!)

I wanted to ask whether providing data in either format has any SEO benefits?

My initial thoughts to provide customer reviews was to be useful to the customer and be useful for search engines as it will be continually updating user generated content (?)

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

[Everett]

Hello Jannkuzel,

Your developers certainly will know what a JSON or XML feed is, and how to implement it. The real question is: should you implement it?

Does the 3rd party publish the review on their site as well? If so, are they crawlable by search engines? Does the feed they give you link back to their site?

Ideally a review solution that you place on your eCommerce site would have reviews that ONLY appear on your site and does not include any links back to the service provider's website. After all, you're paying them so why should they also get free advertising, traffic and page-rank from you? However, an ideal solution and an affordable one often do not overlap.

I may have just complicated things more for you, but to answer your question:
Yes, the ideal solution described above would have SEO benefits for you. However, if the 3rd party site publishes the same content (e.g. your reviews) on their website it could create problems for you too.

Regards,

Everett

[jannkuzel]

Thanks for your prompt reply Everett.

Does the 3rd party publish the review on their site as well? Yes

If so, are they crawlable by search engines? Yes (they are cached in SERP so yes?)

Does the feed they give you link back to their site? No link back to their site only one/two logos.

So just to confirm XML or JSON feeds would be crawled and have SEO benefit but having the same content (reviews) on our site and the reviewers own site could cause duplicate content issue?

Thanks in advance. I look forward to your reply.

[Everett]

Hello Jannkuzel,

That is correct.

Some 3rd party review sites get around this by placing the content on your site in an iFrame. What this would essentially mean is that they get credit for the content and you don't. So while that may be a good experience for your users, having the content on your page in an iFrame would not help your SEO directly.

If the content is NOT in an iFrame and is crawlable on the page (just search for a snippet of the comments/reviews in your source code) then you would have a duplicate content problem with that same content showing up on the 3rd party's website.

An ideal situation would be for you to be the only site that shows the reviews and comments since they are about your products, after all.

Good luck!

Everett