The Place of Review Filters in Local Search |
| The Place of Review Filters in Local Search Posted: 26 Feb 2013 05:41 PM PST Posted by David Mihm In its recent report on "Yelp's Rocky Relationship with Small Businesses," PBS Media Shift was the latest mainstream media outlet to cover one of the most controversial topics in all of local search: search engines' filtering of customer reviews. The topic first came to prominence four years ago in Kathleen Richards' landmark piece on Yelp's aggressive sales pitches -- or extortion, depending on your perspective and whom you believe. While I was never fully convinced of corporate misbehavior on Yelp's part, the company hasn't done itself any favors by continuing to allow its field operatives to use deceptive sales tactics. Despite its best efforts to educate both business owners and everyday users of the site, the poor reputation of Yelp's salespeople continues to contribute to confusion around review filtering among the small business community. I hope to be able to clear up some of that confusion with this post and offer a few tactical tips to help avoid the frustration these filters can cause. Why review filters existAs local search usage among the general public has exploded over the last several years, more and more directories have (rightly) seen reviews as a way to:
In many ways, Yelp was ahead of its time on all four of these bullet points, and as a result, it had to tackle the inevitable review spam that accompanied its popularity. Its answer was arguably the first widespread local review filter: an algorithm for detecting and removing spam or suspicious-looking content. In Yelp's own words:
For those of you who couldn't quite keep up with Yelp's version of Micro Machines man, the primary reasons are:
Yelp's CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, recently gave his own slower version of this rationale in a company-produced video:
How review filters workWhile I don't have any detailed knowledge of Yelp's review filter specifically, many comparable filters seem to kick into action if any of the following is present in the content of the review:
Another criterion that also tends to trigger filtering is a sudden burst of reviews preceded by or followed by a long lull between them. Some of the more sophisticated review filters, including Yelp's, take a look at user characteristics, too, including:
The bottom line is that reviews written by active users have an astronomically-higher likelihood of "sticking" on a local search engine than those written by first-time or infrequent reviewers. And even beyond their stickiness, many local search experts (including myself) speculate that reviews left by active users also influence rankings to a much greater extent than those left by first-time or infrequent reviewers. Problems with review filters  “I Can See the Future of Your Google Reviews”by Margaret Shulock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at blumenthals.com The algorithms behind review filters are far from perfect, as many readers probably know, and Yelp is far from the only local search engine with a review filter. In fact, Google+ has probably accrued more ire from business owners as a result of its filter in 2012 and 2013 than any other site. Unfortunately, these filters frequently:
All of which leads to frustration from the standpoint of a small business owner. Avoiding review filtersYelp is probably the most aggressive of its peers at enforcing its business review guidelines, which also happen to be the most onerous guidelines of any local search engine. Yelp's filtering is so aggressive that one in five reviews written on Yelp never shows up on the site! To sum up those guidelines:
O ye business owner who disobeys those guidelines, beware! You run the risk of a public shaming. Although Yelp's guidelines are considerably more onerous than its peers', Google+ is not far behind in stringency. However, many local search engines are far less prickly about soliciting reviews from customers, or even incentivizing them, and some (including Google) have even engaged in this behavior themselves. For those who have been caught in the Google+ review filter, Mike Blumenthal has covered your travails par excellence and has authored a most reasonable response. Miriam Ellis and Joy Hawkins have also given excellent advice on this front. Review guidelines at major local search enginesHere are direct links to those guidelines at a few of the biggest players:
The review filters of the futureWhile the search engines may throttle their level of filtering from time to time, the review filter is a local search institution that is here to stay. The primary methods of these filters, though, I think will change pretty dramatically. Rather than judging a review by its content or looking at website behavior (e.g. how many reviews a user has left for other businesses), the explosion in smartphone adoption is enabling a couple of far less easily-manipulated criteria to judge the veracity of a review.
And even for those platforms without the handset or payment-processing advantage, requiring location-awareness for users of mobile applications prior to leaving a review seems like a no-brainer (which Yelp has already implemented and Google may be well on its way to doing). For those sites that are more desktop-dependent, widespread adoption of primary social logins (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) could lead to a baked-in layer of spam-fighting. As Eric Schmidt recently said: “Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.” In some industries (e.g., DUI law, plastic surgery, psychology), anonymity may be a pre-requisite for any user reviews and these local search platforms may need a Plan B. But for most industries, requiring some sort of verified social profile would solve a lot of problems. Facebook, of course, has a huge leg up on everyone else based on its knowledge of a user's social connections. Google+, meanwhile, could look at a user's activity across Google's entire range of products (web search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.) to stop spammers in their tracks. While consumer privacy concerns around these mechanisms for review filtering may arise, many business owners would likely rejoice at a truer, less bug-ridden filtering algorithm and a more accurate and complete representation of their customers' experience. Well, that's enough out of me for this week! How about you? What are some of your strategies for avoiding these dreaded review filters? What other methods of filtering do you see coming to Local Search? Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
| Advanced Wordpress SEO: Permalink Changes & Multilingual Implementation Posted: 26 Feb 2013 01:54 AM PST Posted by Nick Herinckx This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. This is a follow-up post to my Advanced Wordpress SEO Mozinar. Thank you so much for those who joined me as we discussed the inherent SEO issues in Wordpress and how to solve them. Wordpress SEO is an exciting topic, and I received a lot of great questions during and after the Mozinar that I didn’t have time to answer live. As I started to read through your follow-up questions, I realized that a lot of them were about the same topics, so I decided to include responses to these common questions in this post for all to see. Of course, there are multiple ways to address these issues in Wordpress as it’s such a flexible platform. I chose to focus this post on the solutions I’ve used in the past, but please include your ideas in the comments section of this post so we can all learn from each other. Proper permalink structure and limitationsDuring the Mozinar, we talked quite a bit about how you can run into significant site speed issues by having your permalink structure for blog posts start with something other than a number. In other words, www.site.com/blog/2012/awesome-post/ runs quickly, while www.site.com/blog/online-marketing/awesome-post/ actually results in site speed issues, particularly as your blog grows. This happens because Wordpress has difficulty deciphering where in the database to pull the post from without a number in the first directory. The team at Wordpress have themselves publicly acknowledged this issue on previous Wordpress versions. A number of listeners were quick to point out, however, that newer versions of Wordpress have actually solved this issue entirely. Indeed, if you have Wordpress 3.3 or later, you can actually forgo needing to begin your posts with a number and use whatever permalink structure you want! No speed issues to worry about. I didn’t mention this difference between Wordpress versions on the Mozinar, and want to clear that up here. The best practice for permalinks (if you have Wordpress 3.3 or later) is to use something like /%category%/%postname%/, or even just /%postname%/, as it is both more user-friendly, results in a more logical site hierarchy, and is also can be more SEO-friendly. Of course, if you haven’t updated Wordpress or are stuck with an older version for some reason (needing expired plugins, significant platform customization, etc.), not starting your blog post URLs (the permalink structure) with a number actually can result in some serious site speed issues. I suggest that either a Wordpress upgrade needs to be completed, or you should consider changing your permalink structure to ensure you have a quick site for users and search engines. Proper way to change permalink structureWhat are the best steps for changing your permalink structure? Maybe you need to maintain and older Wordpress version, and thus need to update your permalink structure due to site speed issues. On the other hand, maybe you just used the default permalink structure when you built your site, but now want to change for SEO or user experience reasons. Updating your URLs is always a delicate change that requires good planning due to the huge impact this can have on your search engine visibility. We always want to make sure that we 301 redirect old URLs to their new counterparts to not just ensure a good user experience, but to properly communicate the change to the search engines in a way that allows them to attribute rankings and link equity to your new URLs. Without establishing 301 redirects, you can really harm your search engine visibility. Wordpress is great in how it allows for easy URL customization due to its very powerful URL re-write controls. Unfortunately, if you change your URL permalink structure, Wordpress implements 302 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, rather than the necessary 301 redirects. I’ve watched more than a few rankings tank due to this Wordpress quirk, and I don’t want this to happen to you! Fortunately, there are two solutions that don’t involve you having to get crazy with redirect-rules or 1to1 301 redirects: Solution #1: Update .htaccess file codeIf you’re changing your permalink structure to /%postname%/ (and ONLY if you’re moving to this permalink structure), I recommend updating your .htaccess file to handle the 301 redirects from your old permalink structure to this new one. I like this approach because working within the .htaccess file is quicker for your Wordpress installation, and keeps your installation from getting bloated with more plugins. Here’s what you need to do:
This allows for a quick update to your .htaccess file without too much mess. If it doesn't work, just change back your permalink structure and re-upload your backed-up .htaccess file. Solution #2: Use a redirect pluginIf you want to use another permalink structure besides /%postname%/, then a simple .htaccess update is out of the picture. Instead, I recommend using a Wordpress plugin to give you the control you need to take care of the 301 redirects. Of course, there are numerous 301 redirect plugins available, but I recommend Redirection by John Godley (again, I’m just a user and have no other relationship with Redirection or John Godley). This plugin automatically 301 redirects URL changes while also allowing for implementation of 1 to 1 301 redirects and even the creation of redirect rules based on regular expressions! All of this from within the Wordpress interface, making it a relatively easy solution for managing a permalink structure transition. Just install this plugin before changing your permalinks, and then once the change has been completed, verify that the 301 redirects were properly put in place. Of course, there are multiple other SEO ramifications to consider when changing URL structure (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo for some more discussion on this), but the above solutions should cover how to properly change your permalinks for most Wordpress installations. Multilingual Wordpress site implementationsThis was a very common question I received after the Mozinar, and surrounds the best way to implement multiple languages on a Wordpress installation so that www.yoursite.com/fr/ returns French translations of your content, and www.yoursite.com/de/ returns German translations, for example. Although Wordpress doesn’t support multilingual sites or blogs out of the box, there are multiple methods for implementing and running multilingual installations. Wordpress provides a detailed overview (including pros and cons) on five different methods to impellent such an installation themselves (just visit http://codex.wordpress.org/Multilingual_WordPress for a list of all available methods), so I won’t rehash all of their great commentary. Instead, I’m going to review my preferred method for setting up a multilingual site, which is to include all available translations in a single page or post, and then have Wordpress automatically choose which one to display based on the language directory selected (such as /fr/ or /de/). Solution: WPML pluginI’ve always used the WPML plugin (no relation outside of being a user) to handle this for the following reasons:
Just visit the WPML site to purchase and for detailed configuration and installation instructions. Installation is just like any other plugin, and this is the best solution I’ve used for multilingual Wordpress blogs. There are other ways!I hope I’ve been able to clear up some common questions about handling Wordpress. I love the platform, but it’s not perfect and requires customization to ensure that’s it’s as SEO friendly as possible. This post outlines what I typically do to address the topics discussed above, but there are, of course, other ways to make the changes we talked about. Please be sure to comment below and let the community know of ways you’ve been able to address the above topics yourself. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
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