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It probably won’t affect badly if unique product information covers more content than those small reviews. I personally follow 80/20 rule here. If your product pages have unique engaging product information than you have no need to worry about. During my audits I encountered 2 type of scenarios. Product page have canned information. Content duplicated internally or manufacturer information which duplicated externally. Some (rarely) store have unique product information. In 1^st case good user reviews helps a lot to create new, informative & engaging content (add uniqueness in product pages). In 2^nd having unique reviews is like cherry on cake, even small reviews won’t hurt.

You can control parameter handling in Google Search Console and direct Google explicitly how to treat parameters. If Google deems a parameter page worthy of being indexed it will index. But if you edit the parameter handling in GSC as mentioned above, they will usually/always follow that. If you get links to a parameter URL and it canonicalizes to the non-parameter, that link equity should flow just find to the non-param page. Triple check meta robots, robots.txt, canonicalization setting to be sure.

thanks Wiliam

thanks Nigel

A thought about blocking competitors...  Most people who land on your website are not going to purchase anything.  If your conversion rate is 2% then 98% of the visits are not made by buyers.  If you have a lot of content pages on your site that receive good traffic then your conversion rate (sitewide) is probably a lot lower. Your competitors might be bidding good money to have their ads appear on your site.  So, it might be a profitable idea to allow the ads and take a piece of your competitors' ad budgets - even if you might lose a few sales.  When you make money from ads you don't have to do any work, but when you make money from sales you must do work - not only filling orders but also supporting customers in their use of the product. We allow many competitors ads to appear on our site, especially those who because of prices or services are not real competitors.  The only exception might be those who are extreme in their price discounting or on websites that are selling consumables and have a very high rate of repeat ordering. At times we might be running low on stock or have employees out.  At those times we might become very aggressive with ads, inserting them high on the page or above the header.  These options are built into our design.

Buzz bundle, and link assistant from seo power suite has tools for this type of usage. You can also save "persona" profile information to create accounts on websites automatically. You will likely run into issues with captchas, but you can add a death by captcha account that allows the program to solve them automatically. For a more manual configuration, you can automate several components of what you want to accomplish using scrapy or beautiful soup tools for python to gather form fields and properties from a the list of urls with regex conditions.

thanks Stephan. It took nearly a month for search console to display the majority of our pages in sitemap as indexed, even though pages showed up much earler in SERPs. We had it split down into 30 different sitemaps. Later we published also a sitemap index and saw a nice increase a few days later in indexed pages which may have been related. Finally google now is indexing 88% of our sitemap. Do you think in general that 88% is for a site of this size a somehow normal percentage or would you normally expect a higher percentage of indexed sitemap page and investigate deeper for potential pages that google may consider thin content? Navigation I can rule out as a reason.

Hi icourse, thanks for your question! You've received some thoughtful responses. Did any of them help you sort your issue out? If so, please mark one or more as a "Good Answer." Thanks! Christy

It would be useful to see an example of what you mean, but the answer is probably not. What to do first is: Ensure you set up hreflang correctly, so that Google understands your Chinese-language page on New York and your English-language page on New York are functionally equivalent. Use a good rank tracker, and configure it to check your keywords on each of the country-level Google sites you're interested in (Google.co.kr for Korea, and so on). See whether the correct page is showing up when you track ranks for the foreign-language name, and for the phonetically-translated name. Check Search Console for the appropriate pages, using the country filter to look only at the kinds of queries and clicks you're getting from each of the countries you're interested in. See whether people are actually searching with the Asian-language name for the city, or with a phonetic translation. See whether people are searching for the English name (they might be). If, after looking at your rank tracking and search console results, you think there are many people in Asia putting English-language city names into their queries, at that point you could consider going ahead with this idea. Even then, try it on just a few of your city pages at first—not all of them—and continue to refer back to your rank tracker. What you don't want to see is any direct competition between different language versions of the same page, in the same SERP.

Your homepage is probably more powerful than your category page and that is why it outranks it. The category page, if it was strong enough to rank in the top ten, would likely be on the first page of the SERPs with your homepage - or instead of your homepage.  That tells me that it lacks strength rather than relevance. The first thing that I would do is make sure that I have taken advantage of all opportunities to build internal links to the category page.  These would be links within paragraph text or a breadcrumb system of links throughout the site. I often add lots of text to category pages.  This can be details about the items shown on the page, relevant information at the top of the page, relevant sidebar information, or supplemental information at the bottom of the page.  Use these to make links to relevant secondary pages within the category. That's what I would do.  If that isn't good enough then you need links from external sites to obtain enough power to rank higher.

Synonyms are part of our everyday language. we use a wide variety of synonyms in every conversation without any loss of meaning or confusion; using them in our written communication (specifically, web copy) ensures that it sounds natural, makes it less of a chore to read, and not just something that has been hammered out, solely to try to gain traction in the search engines. Google knows that its continued dominance relies on it's ability to deliver relevant results and understanding how synonyms work is an integral part of that, so, unsurprisingly, this is something they are very, very good at. (Here's a 2010 article from the official Google blog which refers to synonyms: https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/helping-comnds puters-understand-language.html.) If you look at Google's example of keyword stuffing (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en) you can see how unreadable that is; much better to add a variety of synonyms throughout a piece of engaging copy. To address your concern directly, editing your copy and replacing keywords with a sprinkling of synonyms is not going to result in you suddenly getting penalised for 'keyword stuffing'. (Remember, that the notion of a keyword density % is a myth See: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/myths-and-misconceptions-about-search-engines Don't forget to test your edits with On-page Grader: https://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader. Proceed with usability and readability in mind - write something a human being would enjoy reading - and you won't go far wrong.

thanks Dimitrii

This is a great question.  You will likely get a few different opinions as well.  I for one am a fan of using the Google Text Cache as my primary source to determine if something is crawlable.  However, I do tend to support my hypothesis with the fetch and render tool as well. Screaming Frog recently launched an update to their toolset which includes rendering.  Consider downloading and seeing how their toolset displays your pages content.  It can be another good source for validating if everything is crawlable. Nick

Thanks a lot Serge!

Hi Britney,  my plan would be to put at the end of the page about 5 small unobstrusive links to 5 different relevant affiliate sites. Thanks for pointing to the case study, which was very interesting and gives hope that if we would suffer penalization by google we could recover fast by just removing the links.

This URL should show you your ratings:  https://www.google.com/shopping/seller?q=ebay.com  (just replace ebay with your domain) However, if you haven't met the new threshold for number of reviews to receive the ratings extension, it appears that it does not show you the ratings gathered thus far (unfortunately).