Google shows reviews pages before product pages

[MindTwist]

This is something that kinda bothers me, with some products and/or some searchs, Google is giving as search results some of my review pages before the actual product page.

Let's say I have a product with the name "VGA Splitter Duplicator 4 puertos (1 PC a 4 monitores)", whose URL is:

Twisted Tienda : VGA Splitter Duplicator 4 puertos (1 PC a 4 monitores) [vgasplitter4] - 30.00EUR

On the top of this page, amongst several links there is one that takes to the comments for this product, which links to:

Twisted Tienda : VGA Splitter Duplicator 4 puertos (1 PC a 4 monitores) [vgasplitter4] - 30.00EUR, Comentarios

The odd thing is that if someone is to find this product on Google, sometimes the given link is the one for the reviews page (which does not even have any review) instead of the main product page. Note, the example I am giving probably is not a good one, since finding that product on google does give the product link, and not the review link. But mysearches are on google.es , so they would probably be of little use to you.

I was wondering how I could make it so the product page will be more important than the reviews page, which on 99.9% of the times doesn't have reviews yet (and probably never will).

I have a couple of sitemaps submited to google, for products and categories:

http://www.twistedtienda.com/googleSitemapProducts.php
http://www.twistedtienda.com/googleS...Categories.php

Seeing the first one, I have no clue why some products would have different priority value than the others. But the only one that comes to my mind now that show the review page before the product page, I see that the product has priority 0.1 on googleSitemapProducts.php. Could that be the reason? Should I make those priorities higher?

Or it might be just easier for me to make the reviews pages invisible to google (with robots.txt maybe?), since I actually don't care much if they are indexed or not, and I do not expect people to find me for my review pages?

thx!

[MindTwist]

Mmmmh and to say some more...

Some of my products are also found on google with the following URL:
http://www.twistedtienda.com/tarjeta...0video%2025fps

While the URL I see everywhere on my store is:
http://www.twistedtienda.com/tarjeta...fps-p-103.html

Any hints on where Google might have found the first URL? It must actually come from somewhere, but I have no idea where. Any ideas on how to make google ignore the longer URL? Any hints?

Thanks!

[met00]

learn about the robots.txt file, for it is your friend.

Here is a quick lesson...

http://www.oakbridgewines.co.uk/robots.txt

you want to disallow access to the reviews.

Disallow: /catalog/reviews.php

Then they shouldn't show up because google won't index anything at that file location.

[MindTwist]

Mmmmmh I am not completely sure that would help, since using Ultimate SEO URL your reviews do not look like links to reviews.php.

That is, what would usually be:

http://www.twistedtienda.com/product...products_id=72

With SEO URL will be:

http://www.twistedtienda.com/vga-spl...res-pr-72.html

so I do not think that disallowing the review PHP files with robots.txt would do the trick...

[MindTwist]

For now I think I found the solution to my second point, which is where the URLs with the added "?name=" parameter where coming from, and it was from allprods.php

When looking at:

Ver todos los Productos : Twisted Tienda

Al the product URLs had the added parameter at the end. This is the only place where I have been able to find this on my store.

To remove that parameter, I had to edit /templates/mytemplate/content/allprods.tpl.php and replace the wollowing code:

PHP Code:

                        echo "     <a href=\"" . tep_href_link(FILENAME_PRODUCT_INFO, 'name=' .str_replace("/", "/", rawurlencode($this_products_name)). '&products_id=' . $this_products_id . (($this_language_code == DEFAULT_LANGUAGE) ? '' : ('&language=' . $this_language_code)), 'NONSSL', false) . "\">" . $this_products_name . "</a><br>\n"; 


with:

PHP Code:

                        echo "     <a href=\"" . tep_href_link(FILENAME_PRODUCT_INFO, '&products_id=' . $this_products_id . (($this_language_code == DEFAULT_LANGUAGE) ? '' : ('&language=' . $this_language_code)), 'NONSSL', false) . "\">" . $this_products_name . "</a><br>\n"; 


Any reason why that extra parameter was included? I really don't see the point on having it there. Makes me think it might be a valid parameter to have when running a multilanguage store, but since I only have my store/products in spanish it does no good to me, and makes google find duplicate URLs to my products.

Now I wonder how long will it take for google to "forget" the URLs with the extra "?name=" there

[met00]

Chemo's mod works with mod rewrite and although I have not used it, my guess is that somewhere in the mod itself where he does the rewrite of the link from standard osc to the format of the rewrite there should a a place where you can do a check on the link to see what the base filename is.

At that point you can put an array before it that has a list of php filenames that you don't want to have the link rewritten on and then NOT have it run the code on that link. That will leave the links in the proper reviews.php format in the pages displayed to the users. Then the changes to the disallow on the robots.txt file should deny the spyder the ability to index the reviews (and other links that you don't want it to follow).

I'm surprised that no one has ever done a mod of this type to the mod Chemo made as the mod has a thread of 1498 posts...

Oh, by the way, the rewrite rule is:
RewriteRule ^(.*)-pr-(.*).html$ product_reviews.php?products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}

that tells me that in the code on the catalog side you need to look for where the php rewrites product_reviews.php to -pr- and you will find the line that needs to be commented out (or if it is done by an array, then removal of the php filename and the associated overwrite component in the array). Since the mod needs to know what to overwrite the rewrite with, somewhere in the code already is the logic to do that filetype, once you locate it and remove it you won't have the rewrites any more (easier to remove code than to add it ).

Good luck.

[MindTwist]

Yeah, it shouldn't be too hard to disable the part that changes reviews into a nice SEOed URL. After all, if I do not want google to index my reviews, I do not care much if they are a nice URL or not.

Guess if I do not find a nicer way to do it, I will have to go this route.

I am still wondering what the heck is that priority thing on my google site map... And that maybe all the products with lower priority are the
ones appearing after their empty reviews page. Wonder if there would be an easy way to just lower the priority for google on all the reviews pages...

[MindTwist]

Fixed it. After all, there was a much easier solution.

The trick was to change the line:
<meta name="robots" content="all">

On the review pages (product_reviews.php and product_reviews_info.php) to:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow,noarchive">

So hopefully, Google will start forgeting about this pages quite soon...