Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi All,

We have started to use a 3rd party review company and now have the choice of either implementing their re-supplied widgets (Java ) on our site showing customer reviews or use their an API to get this information.

1. The widgets (Java) , would be loaded once the page is actually loaded so I am not sure how and if google will read this information if at all?  If we use a widget then we won't be able to implement it with Schema.org although we will be able to use rich snippets to it will appear on any PPC (once we have had 30 reviews). If we go down the API route, it's more expensive for us but we can use the review schema.org for this. Does anyone have any experience of what works best for them ?..

2. We have a choice of having a widget showing latest reviews or just a badge (which is actually a link to the review site showing our reviews). From an SEO point of view, is one better than the other ? Does google actually read the content of the review or is the link back to the 3rd party review company sufficient enough to help with rankings etc.

3. Am I correct in assuming that by linking to a 3rd party review company and showing our reviews on our site , this will help with rankings as even though the content in the reviews doesn't really say much ,. I did see it was a ranking factor  on the survey but not sure how google uses this. ?

I've read up some information on reviews etc but wondered what the general consensus was with what others found works best for them

Any help greatly appreciated

Pete

Many thanks Patrick for your help.

I will look at those links etc you mention above. Just quickly, most of my articles are actually how to articles e.g How to aerate your lawn etc , so I am guessing these would come under  -https://schema.org/TechArticle   as oppose to Blog . Is that how it you would do it.

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We use schema.org on most of our eCommerce website apart from on our "latest news/blog section" which we have all our how to's ...and other useful articles on . Am I missing a trick here ?.. I have found there is a https://schema.org/Article  which I guess we could implement if it's a big help or if there's a better one ?

Just wondered peoples thought as whether it is must have from an SEO/ranking point of view

thanks

Pete

Many thanks all. I will look at those articles and give it a go and see what happens.

Pete

Hi All,

I read an interesting answer from Tom Roberts on another question and one of things he mentioned was that there are conflicting reports about "Click to Expand " Content being discounted with a link to the article  - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html

My eCommerce uses this method on every landing page and tabs on our products pages so I am wondering if others had first hand knowledge of whether using these methods had affected their sites or not ?.

I may try to experiment on a few pages to remove this and show all content at the bottom but it does kinda ruin the pages a bit so I wanted to know what peoples thoughts were before I screw up my pages and think about page redesign etc etc.

Also , if I was to try it ,then how long should I experiment for ?. would a couple of weeks be sufficient providing google crawls them regually

thanks

Pete

Hi,

Just a quick query regarding the "talk about Google will not longer index click to expand content". We use this method all over our newly designed eCommerce site and since our penalty removal , rankings have not improved as much as I had hoped so I was wondering if you had experienced a decrease in rankings on pages that use this ?

I will probably try and experiment a some pages on my site with the click to expand removed and all content showing but it does make the pages less attractive. Also I am not sure how long I would need keep the experiment going for to see a change or not in rankings?

thanks

Peter

Many thanks Patrick,

I will take a look at the article etc.  These pages are gone and wont' be coming back , so It looks like a 410 would be fine.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We have approx 6,000 - 404 pages. These are for categories etc we don't do anymore and there is not near replacement etc so basically no reason or benefit to have them at all.

I can see in GWT , these are still being crawled/found and therefore taking up crawler bandwidth.

Our SEO agency said we should 410 these pages?.. I am wondering what the difference is and how google treats them differently ?.

Do anyone know When should you 410 pages instead of 404 ?

thanks

Pete

Many thanks Patrick. I will take a look at those posts you suggest

Peter

Many thanks for you help and answer.

Our SEO agency has said our Site Profile is pretty clean now with most of our links being branded terms etc.

Our Domain Authority is only 27 , It was once as high as 30 and has been as low as 25 so we are

recovering slowly from that.

We will keep writing fresh content etc and hopefully when Penguin etc refreshes we will see an uplift.

Many thanks for your help.  I will take a look at the post you suggested

thanks

Peter

Hi ,

Sorry for the late response, I've been away for the last couple of weeks.

Originally my rankings dropped like 80% , then when the side wide penalty was recovered, It improved by 50% of that drop.

When the Impact links penalty recovered, I was still ranking approx 6th - 10th for many local terms which previously I was ranking top 3.

thanks

Peter

Hi All,

We got a penalty Last March 2014 ( Side Wide Link - unnatural links) which we recovered from quickly and this changed to Partial Match penalty (impact links)

which we recovered from back in December 2014. Our Site profile has been cleaned up but our rankings

still suck for some of our main keywords (+500) . Also our traffic and local rankings still suck in some cases. From an SEO point of view our site is pretty good,  we've done everything google has recommended including schema.org, mobile responsive, unique content (which we write regulary) and we only have a few duplicate pages. Our domain

authority is better than our competitors but yet our rankings and traffic are still no way as good as theirs.

Do anyone know if recovering from an impact links penalty take longer than 4 months . I know that google says than it discounts those links but I get the feeling google may be looking at an old dataset due to not rerunning panda & penguin since our penalty was removed and this may be whats affecting things.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I am more than happy to post my url if someone fancies taking a quick look ? to see if it's anything obvious ?

thanks

Pete

Many thanks Ryan,

I will look to do those things.

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

I've been looking at the internal links on my eCommerce site to try and improve PR and get it as efficient as possible so link juice isnt getting wasted etc and I've come across some odd ones I would like some advice on

My website currently has between 125-146 links on every page (Sitemap approx 3500 pages). From what I read ,the ideal number of links is under 100 but can someone confirm is this is still the case ?..Is it a case of less is more , in terms of improving a page PR etc ? in terms of link juice strength etc so it's not getting diluted to unnecessary pages.

1. One of my links is a bad url ( my domain + phone number for reason) which currently goes to a 404 page ?. - Is this okay or do we need to track down the link and remove it. I don't want link juice getting wasted as it's on every page.

2. Another one of my links is my domain.name/# and another one with some characters after the # which both to the home page. Example www.domain.co.uk/#   and www.domain.co.uk#abcde   both go to homepage.  Is this okay or  am I potentially getting duplicate content as If I put these urls in , they go to my home page.

3. I have a link on every page which opens up outlook (email) on the contact us. Should this really be changed to a button with a contact us form opening up instead ?

4. I currently have 9 links on the bottom on every page i.e About it , delivery , hire terms,.contact us , trade accounts , privacy, sitemap.  When I check , these pages seem to be my strongest pages in terms of PR. Is that because they are on every page?.. Should I look to reduce these links as they are accessible from the navigation menu apart from privacy and sitemap.

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated ?

thanks

Pete

Hi Errick,

Thanks for your thoughts. Yes, I know what you mean. These are location landing pages for local search so I need to put the City in there . Curently it's in Title tag, H1, H2 tag although I do try and vary the phrases up a bit . The on page content at the bottom of the screen is unique for each city basically usually explaining usual tips, our product range etc and the branch NAP is currently contained within this.

We use to rank top 3 for pretty much every city in the UK before algorithm changes over the last 15 months or so having caused our local rankings to drop a bit although we are still on first page for most of them. To get up to the top in local search is proving a lot harder.

It's difficult to really know what other /alternative content I can put here for each city or whether reducing the city name would have a positive or negative effect.

It;s also hard to find examples of other sites who have a similar structure where its really worked for them.

thanks

Pete

Hi Monica,

I have the company registered address (i.e head office) at the very bottom of the footer which is on every page.

However, On my location specific landing pages, I have the branch infomation - NAP in the content if you click on the Read more link which is in the content at the bottom -

I enclose a url an example http://goo.gl/f3GvQ2

I was thinking of also displaying the NAP quite high the page in the white space on the left below the sub category links

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

I currently have location specific pages and my branch information(NAP) is currently displayed at the bottom in the page content. I was thinking off displaying the NAP again higher up the page so it's very visible for the user possibly under a h tag heading as well.

Do you think it would be spammy or harm my seo efforts it my NAP was displayed twice on a page ?.  Once in the content which currently it's not visible unless the user clicks on the read more link in the content on the bottom of the page , and again further up the page where I have some white space which I can utilize

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

thanks

Peter

Many thanks Laura,

A Very comprehensive answer to my query.

I was referring to local organic search results with reference to  whether citations would help with them as opposed to maps etc but I think by what you're saying is that they will.

I will read those articles you kindly linked in as well.

Many thanks

Peter

Hi All,

My ecommerce site has different category/landing pages for each of my branches . I'm currently getting some more citations done as wondered the following

1. Is it a general rule to say, that the more citations you have the better as long as they are consistent and free?

2. Given that I have different categories /landing pages showing the NAP of my individual branches along with unique content, should all these extra citations help with local rankings across my whole site or is it usually just helping the specific localized webpage it's pointing to ?

3. I can get a company to help me do my citations but to do all the branches, it is going to be quite expensive. Is citations quite a big individual SEO factor in local search as opposed to on page seo factors etc etc.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

thanks

Peter

Many thanks Miriam

I will get a citation audit done.

thanks

Peter