Feedback Mechanism Suggestions Please

[DHS_SH]

Hi all

I work for an e-commerce company and we have a website with around 20,000 products.

The CMS I inherited was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, creating upwards of 3-4 links for each product, causing me a duplicate content issue of almighty proportions.

I am just coming out of a piece of web development work that looks to tackle this. I have now added canonical links to each main product page and 301 redirected all the other versions through to this 1 'perfect' version.

This only happened last week so I'm waiting for the search engines to get hold of the changes and (touch wood) see an improvement in product page performance.

The only problem I now have with product pages is the fact that a lot of the less popular items all have generic descriptions. These arent manufacturer descriptions, but descriptions that were created and bulk uploaded across a large number of products (replacing product names, Ids, sizes etc. etc.).

In an ideal world these product descriptions would be 100% unique, but I thought that 1 solution would be to add a product review mechanism to each product page. This would allow me to increase the % of unique content on each page

Couple of questions:

1. What do you guys think of this idea as a possible solution for the duplicate content problem?

2. Can you recommend any software/plugins/widgets that I can use on my website? All I can find are Wordpress solutions and I don't think these will work for me

[Everett]

Hello DHStom,

In my experience I'd expect it to be easier to write unique copy for a product than to get reviews for it. With that said, I think reviews on product pages are a good idea either way - though you should rewrite the product descriptions for usability and conversion improvement if nothing else.

Try these:

• http://www.powerreviews.com/
• http://www.gigya.com/social-plugins/ratings-reviews/
• http://www.pluck.com/
• http://www.reevoo.com/
• http://www.bazaarvoice.com/