Microformats hreview with invisible item - microformats

I'm implementing the hreview portion of microformats on a site to be indexed by Google.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146645
The item field of a review feels clunky to me, since I can't imagine why I'd included the name of the item being reviewed inside the review itself.
For example. If you are on Yelp there is a page about a restaurant. The name of the restaurant is at the top, but it wouldn't' make sense to repeat the restaurant name also inside each review block.
So I'm wondering if the item field is one of the ones that can be invisible to the user and still indexed by google? Incidentally, I just checked and it looks like Yelp has this field with a display: none; to the user.
Can anyone verify this?

Do you have some reason to believe there are fields that can't be hidden and still indexed by Google? It seems likely to me that Google will index all hidden fields, just because I doubt it's worth checking for them. But I'm not sure about that.
Hiding fields isn't recommended for microformats. A core idea behind microformats is you should be presenting the same content to both computers and humans. If the content isn't anywhere on the page, that violates that idea. If it's somewhere else on the page, which is often the case for reviews, you can use the include pattern.

Related

What is the permalink to a blog post on Shopify?

Given a product id (PRODUCTID), the permalink to the published product page on Shopify is https://SHOP.myshopify.com/products/ID.
For a blog post, there are two ids, id of the blog post, and id of the blog. How do I get the permalink to the blog post?
I tried https://SHOP.myshopify.com/articles/BLOGPOSTID, but it did not work.
Not sure what you mean by permalink. When you access a product, if you were going to want a longer term solid reference to it, I think the handle serves as a better "permalink" than ID. Handle is used for search engines, and the site map. ID's are more for an administrative view of things, and note that an ID can change if you were to accidentally delete the product and recreate it. Happens all the time I bet. But the handle, that stays.
As for referencing blog articles, yes. They remain a bit tougher than products, since they do have that extra reference ID in the path. The reference of blogs/name_of_the_blog/ID_article_handle is awkward for sure. Why Shopify still keeps the article ID in there is due to some really longstanding old code no one has to see real reason to fix.
It used to be a lot of pseudo-seo-smart people dissed the whole Shopify URL scheme as unworkable for SEO, but I think in the end, they were proven to be a hefty lot of nothing to see here, move along.

Schema.org mandatory fields and the time needed until Google shows changes

I have implemented Schema.org (using Microdata) inside my product pages and when I check Google Webmaster Tools it is crawled by Googlebot and interpreted successfully. The point is I have not implemented some properties inside Product type like brand.
I need to know whether there is some subset of all product attributes should be implemented essentially?
And the second question is how much it takes for Google to show product rating and price as rich snippet inside search results?
There are no mandatory properties/types in Schema.org.
However, consumers of the data, like Google Search, might have rules under which conditions they will make something with your data (e.g., they are looking for specific properties). So you’d have to check their documentation.
For Google Search, their Rich Snippets are documented at https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/. The Products Rich Snippets lists the required and optional properties/types. As you can see, the brand property is not required by Google for showing their Rich Snippet in the search results.
Hussein
As google has pointed out the structured data required for a snippet are :
Product
Name
Description
Pricespecifications (to include:)
Pricecurrency
Pricevalue
Availability
Validfrom
Image
First you should consider checking if the validfrom and availability attributes are added because both of them are the most common mistakes when you write your first SEO codes.
Then there are some attributes that while they are not in required list by Google's developers there seem to be the once that all successful snippets have (you might have noticed that too ) , the : review and vote attributes including the expect values from schema.org libraries. In some people's opinion ,mine also, having those will "almost" make sure they will get noticed.
Those are not pretty easy to get because u will have to create a way for getting reviews and votes.
Otherwise try using the webmaster new tool search console to highlight data for product snippet. Just make sure that the required attributes have their expected values in the text so you can mark all the above attributes with the tool.
Make sure all the attributes are markup and not meta data as it shows you are just making information up.
About the time , check that the structured data have increase for the peoduct and if not then fetch and submit to index.

How do you split one schema.org item across several pages?

I have a single page describing an organisation marked up with schema.org data, there are then multiple related pages with review data on.
At the moment these review pages have the same Organisation tag as the main page but this doesn't feel right to me, it seems like there should be one Organisation record for each company.
Does anyone have an experience or guidance on this matter or the best way of marking up review data on related pages?
-- I have thought about using the organisation url parameter on the review pages which points back to the main page but I am concerned this would eventually impact the listing of these review pages.
Updated with examples
This is an example of the main organisation page http://www.insidebuzz.co.uk/law/hogan-lovells
And this is one of the sub pages http://www.insidebuzz.co.uk/reviews/hogan-lovells/question/overall-satisfaction
[update 5/17/2013]
I've now found that the way we can link items from one to another is with itemid=". This link is to the WebSchemas/ExternalEnumerations page "Country" example. This example shows how this is done. Pay keen attention to the "itemid" usage.
NOT THE ANSWER:
Per HTML - Living Standard -- We can use the HTML5 Microdata "itemref" to accomplish your goal.
[example removed for brevity]
I've done this in MVC by placing the itemscope itemtype="... in the MVC equivalent of a Master Page and in the View's (child pages) used itemprop and itemref etc.
NOT THE ANSWER:
http://schema.org/CollectionPage
isPartOf = Indicates the collection or gallery to which the item belongs.
Hope this helps.

Some undesired words appeared in Google's snippets, how to get read of it?

I know Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") are mainly come from META description. However, when one of my web pages shows up, there are some undesired words like price (which is not good at all). What I want it to show is just the description of the product rather than its price. Actually the price only mentioned twice in the whole page.
How could this happen? And how can I remedy it?
Including the price in the snippet is actually very desirable for most people. If your price is higher than the competition's for the same products they probably don't want to buy from you and check out other results instead.
To make sure the search engines don't see the price (and thus don't display it in the results) you should use JavaScript. I think even Amazon does this to prevent screen scraping in some cases. It should be easy, especially with something like jQuery.
$('#priceForProduct987A').html("$125")
You should be able to control the snippet displayed by google through the use of the meta tags:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812
However the results displayed by Google in this case might be different if someone is trying to do some searching on a product. Google will then think you're shopping for that product and try to display the price of it. This might be the case for you.

Good URL strategy for sitemap and SEO

I run a site where users have their own profile pages. They are also able to post products for sale (that they have made) and write/import blog posts. I am going to be implementing a sitemap and I need to make a final decision with the URL strategy.
Here's what I currently have for products (where 1234 is the product ID that I use to lookup that product):
N.B "product" is a fixed string (although it's another word in the actual site) - all others are dynamic depending on the item.
example.com/product/1234.product-category.product-name
should I change to any of these? i.e:
example.com/maker/users_name/product-category/product-name/1234
example.com/product/product-category/product-name/1234
example.com/product/1234/product-category/product-name
The main items for consideration are:
Where should the product ID go in the URL? Both in terms of readability by the user but also in SEO terms
Should I include the user's name (as he/she made that product) ?
Should I attempt to remove the ID altogether?
I think the first example (example.com/product/1234.product-category.product-name) is the best format but I would consider changing then "." to "-". I am just thinking that if somehow a product name ends in something that triggers an different handler on your server like ".php" or ".jsp" you might have some undesired effects.
Where should the product ID go in the URL? Both in terms of readability by the user but also in SEO terms
I don't really think it matters too much where the product ID goes but as far as the user reading it, I think they pay attention to the end of the line so I would put the ID first leaving the most descriptive part (the product name) at the end.
Should I include the user's name (as he/she made that product) ?
Not sure if you allow your users to change user names, but if you did I would leave the user name out. An example would be someone getting married and changing their last name. This would hurt your SEO since the URL would change but search engines would have already indexed it the old way. You'd have to put some permantent redirects in place to handle this which could be avoided by just leaving the username out.
Should I attempt to remove the ID altogether?
You should leave the ID in the URL in the event that two products have the same name and your algorithm to generate the URL creates a duplicate link.
I prefer this:
example.com/users_name/product-category/product-name/1234
However, one should be aware that the url gets too long some times. It is difficult to represent or promote in a blog or a forum. Why not simply use
example.com/1234 and use the Title to put the other details like category and product name?
Now a days, I think search engines are getting smarter and short urls are used more and more.