Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Google notices a series of review sites that it then uses to help support its ads and also consumers when making an informed decision about a product or service.

The reviews will in most cases be pulled into Google ads and displayed as an aggregate Star rating. You will also be able to click the ratings to see all the reviews. e.g. https://www.google.co.uk/shopping/seller?q=caravanguard.co.uk

Your start ratings will appear in your google ads if you have more than 30 reviews over 3 stars in the previous 12 months.

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As for selecting a site to push your reviews to I would suggest you read this post.

1. Click on the + We base seller ratings on a number of sources including:
2. Then Click + We feature reviews via feeds from these independent review websites.

It lists all those who are in effect Google Partners (Feefo, TrustPilot, Revoo and many more) these are probably best sites to use if you want a connection. However, do not discount the use of Facebook, G+ for further social proof and trust factors that consumer now crave when making in informed desicion about a purchase.

Finally as a note - if you do not use any of the Google Partner sites, make sure you bring some reviews to hold on your own site, maybe a simply review collection form, You can then use the schema for rating to display your aggregate ratings in your organic listings, this helps them to stand out from the rest.

See here for Aggregate Ratings Schema and here for individual ratings.

Hope this helps.

Tim

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Again as per MoosaHemani and Lynnp, Google's algorthims will often choose a string of characters from within the sites content that is deemed suitable for the page, normally the first descriptive paragraph. This will remain in place until you set up your meta descriptions correctly.

Sometimes you may also find that the Yahoo/Bing network also do the same.

It would seem that there are a couple of DNS issues including not finding a reverse address for the IP on one of the bigCommerce name servers.

Could not find reverse address for 104.195.80.2 (2.80.195.104.in-addr.arpa.).
PTR record(s) for the address could not be found in the .arpa-zone. (ip6.arpa. for IPv6 addresses and in-addr.arpa. for IPv4).

http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=justkeyrings.co.uk

There are a couple of methods to help reduce any ghost/referral spam you may be getting, one is to use your htaccess, (this reduces crawled traffic only) and the other is to set up filters in GA.

This post from Carlos Escalera, is one of my favourites. https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

Hope this helps.

Hmmm, this is probably a devisive question. For me if they are genuine legitimate reviews then it should not be too much of an issue although some sites were recently hit for manipulative fake reviews etc. Rather than using an external review site I for your emailed in survey results I would suggest hosting them on your own site. maybe www.yourdomain.com/reviews or on any particular product pages. You can still use schema mark up on these to gain an organic star rating in the serps.

If you want to get a CTR boost to your adwords content, again with a star rating, then I would suggest re-soliciting your old reviewers with a link and kindly ask them to resubmit their review on your chosen review site. Google has a list of preferred third party partner sites. See below...  More can also be found on google seller ratings / review here 

You could also try using Google consumer surveys.

Ausgezeichnet.org
Avis-Verifies
Bazaarvoice
Bizrate
eKomi
E-Komerco
ECナビ
The Feedback Company
Feefo
FIA-NET
Hardware.info
KiyOh
Klantenvertellen
Poulpeo
PriceGrabber
ResellerRatings
Reviews.co.uk
Reevoo
Shopper Approved
ShopVote.de
ShopAuskunft
StellaService
Trusted Shops
TrustPilot
Viewpoints.com
Yopi.de
Yotpo
お財布.com
クチコミの王様
Zoorate

Hope this helps.

In my experience the smaller niche directories are a little different to those that are very large, generic and spammy which any Tom, Dick and Harry can feature on. As it focuses a bit more on the manufacturing industry It will most likely be ok and in essence actually probabaly provide a bit of a benefit due to its relevancy.

If it is a paid for directory the links should really be no followed to avoid any penalties, I would also try not to use directories for link value but more for brand awareness and driving relevant traffic.

It is the aforementioned larger none niche specific directories I would certainly steer well clear of.

Hope that makes sense.

Cheers

Tim

Your sitemap all looked good, but when I tried to view the robots.txt file in your root, it returned a 404 and so was unable to determine if there was an issue. Could any of your settings in your WordPress installation also be causing it to trip over.

Not for myself in the UK as yet... I was reading a post from Barry Schwartz on SEO Round Table earlier who thinks it may not have fully rolled out just yet.

You can use pretty much most aggregated data for your star ratings. Although I am unsure if they will block some sources, especially if you have stated the source as FB (although looking at your results that is not the case).

Secondly, despite having your schema attached to your site and with no errors, Google does not necessarily have to display it, one day it may appear, the next it may have gone, luck of the draw. If you have only added it recently, give it a bit of time.

You can find more on aggregate rating here. http://schema.org/AggregateRating 

I know you are pinning this on the structure of the site, however, when did your structural change take place? Could you have also taken a small hit from the recent penguin / panda refresh that has seemed to have rolled out recently??

We certainly saw a little movement here.

This is a link to an article from Barry Schwartz on the rumblings. 
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-shift-panda-penguin-19437.html

Hmmmmm 300+ pages all with very similar content. This would make it difficult to canonicalise to just one product of each type.

Rather than having lots of different pages with just blue chair, green chair, red chair. Could you simply not just have chair and then as an option the colour within the page.

So

Leather High Back Chair.
Price - $£200
Options - red, cream, black , tan [make a selection box/check box to choose] This way you have just one item that can be optimised be the main item.

Hope that helps.

I think Krzysztof has nailed it.... think about the site you are commenting on for links. make sure it is relevant, high quality and moderated well.

If you are potentially touting your business I would also advise requesting the link is set to no-follow for safety and to ensure you do not get penalised for it.

I also think you should make sure the link is 100% useful to the users who will also see it.

According to the following post fro WIX (not date stamped) - click here

"While it is currently not possible to manually add a markup schema to your site's source code, some of the content on Wix sites, such as blog posts and eCommerce, is already marked up in accordance with schema.org. "

From this I can only assume despite some schema being implemented, additional features such as Ratings will not be possible. They do appear to be trying to collect votes for this to be a feature.

This is one of my main issues with WIX, you can create great looking sites and SEO has improved, but for me having a custom build allows you to be much more, proactive, planned and reactive to the challenges that SEO offers up on a daily basis.

Hope that helped.

Hello fellow Mozzers,

We have two websites for two similar brands at my place of employment, the two brands currently serve slighly different products but could be held quite happily under one branded site. As part of a potential group merger into one sole brand, we will have to create one joined up website which will then feature all our products. The newly merged site will also have more scope to allow us to expand our product range where as currently one brand is kind of specific to a particular market due to its name.

So as part of the Merge, I have to consider the potential implications for our search traffic, as this is an integral part of our business.

Brand A - older, more authorative, great content, good organic positions - top 10 for pretty much all terms we favour.

Brand B - younger, but has more marketing scope due to name, still good site and lots of content.

Unfortunately Brand B has more in terms of potential lifespan, but is currently the less authorative of the two sites we run. it has lower DA and PR according to my Moz Analytics, a lower number of quality links and less content. In order to give the Brand B website the boost that is needed and in effect replace Brand A in the serps which has great organic positions, I need to make sure all bases are ticked for an action plan.

So far this is what I have.

1. Transfer all exisiting Brand A web pages to Brand B website.
2. Rel canonical all Brand A pages to now point to Brand B websites new pages.
3. 301 redirect all pages on Brand A to Brand B during the transfer.
4. Once 301 redirects are in place then request external sites to actually repoint to Brand B website for any links.
5. Update xml Sitemaps
6. Update any content that mentions Brand B to now be Brand A.
7. resubmit sitemaps to Webmaster tools
8. Update all social profiles
9. Update all local search profiles and listings
10. Update all review sites with new brand name / merge any with both brands

On a supplementary note for customer information, looking to also keep the older Brand A Home page up for a short time to help people understand the transition rather than a complete redirect which to our demographic could confuse and alienate people. Will also look to send a mass email to roughly 400K people informing them of the move abd how it affects them.

I have no doubt there will be some glaringly obvious additions, any further advice would be much appreciated.

Hope you are all well.

Tim

Ah so each chair can have up to 300+ fabrics available to it. That is a very customisable chair. I was expecting you to say a few colour options, a few leg options and few fabric options etc, not into the hundreds. You could make the UX/UI relatively easy to understand if presented in a nice step by step guide once a user has landed on the chairs page. e.g. Step 1: Choose your legs, Step 2: Choose your fabric , Step 3: Choose a colour.

If this is a definate no go In that case I would imagine that you would need to try and do a little more on the unique content front for each item. I know that will be a pain, but getting your H1, title and first paragraphs, product alt tags, product schema to include the product name will be imperative. If the rest of the product is similar it will be very hard to make each totally unique.

This is a great example I just found - http://www.sofasbysaxon.com/the-range/customiser/sofas/typist-chair. Even though it could do with a little refinement

I wouldn't say that they have created two pages, it is just that because you have two versions of the domain and not set a preferred version that you are getting it indexing twice. .HTaccess changes are under the hood of the website and could have simply been an oversight.

An interesting concept which I do agree is most likely not commonly monitored. We have purposely tried move to verified review partners which only accept reviews from genuine customers of our service, but that is not to say that open review sites cannot still be plagued by negative fake reviews or in this case good fake reviews. Surely it is about time that all review site had to partake in a verifiable way of getting all reviews.

Howdy all,

In recent weeks I have seen a steady increase in the number of smartphone related url errors on Googles Search Console (formerly webmaster tools).

THe crawler appears to be searching for a /m/ or /mobile/ directory within the URLs. Why is it doing this? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately this is for an unresponsive site, would setting the viewport help stop the issue for know until my new responsive site is launched shortly.

Cheers fello Mozzers

Tim

NDh1RNs

The SameAs (property of thing) is only for URLs that can be attributed as the same item.

URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity. E.g. the URL of the item's Wikipedia page, Freebase page, or official website. I am not sure there is a variant for keywords and global terms. You could try name and alternateName.

More product Schema markup variables can be found here

Hi Remko.

I too am in the insurance space (full time job) and have also seen a huge increase in .tk domains recently, I personally have assumed they are a sustained negative attack and as such have been disavowing many of these sites over the past few months. They just keep cropping up.

Cheers Tim