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Almost a year ago, Matt Cutts asked his blog readers to Give Google feedback on “noresults” pages. According to Matt, “The #1 complaint (20+ comments) was “empty review” sites.”, and as far as his post at the time was concerned, empty review pages were in breach of the following Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches…

Keeping your content thin pages under the radar

“Empty review pages”, or new pages that invite users to add general UGC for the first time have been around for an age and I imagine search quality analysts at search engine companies are always going to struggle detecting the best ones. Regardless of the noise in Matt’s post from last year, it’s more than possible to add enough value to your no review pages to avoid getting them kicked out of the index.

I recommend you tread carefully when dealing with large volumes of site content in this way, and you should construct an analytics strategy capable of measuring the impact localised to the blank pages compared to the content rich pages before proceeding. Ultimately what we’re trying to do is reduce the bounce rate on these pages and increase organic traffic too.

Adding user value to “no results”, “no deals” and “blank review” pages

It almost sounds like a contradiction in terms; adding user value to “no results” pages, but it’s a goal that can be achieved. What changes could you make to your internal pages to add more user value, improve search engine traffic and make your pages more unique?

Return a snippet of content from a parent or related page

Let’s imagine you offer a range of user reviews for tourist destinations. The destination (landing) page hasn’t been populated by a user review just yet – so why not pull snippets from the surrounding content pages? Think about filtering your data in the following ways:

• Reviews from locations within 500 metres
• Most popular / visited in the area
• Most commented within 1km
• Similar attractions within a 30 minute walk or bus ride
• Display a map with all nearby attractions

Pull images and more from related sites via their APIs

By providing the best content you can to the visitor, you reduce the risk of them leaving straight away, and that’s what a lot of your focus should be about. Entice them with a rich, related mashup of images and information from sites such as Flickr or news and blog RSS feeds that you feel are relevant. We’re not so much talking about scraping, more featuring a snippet of content the user may be interested in, with the correct attribution citing the original source. Tools such as Yahoo’s YQL can allow you to quickly and easily create exceptionally powerful and rich feeds from Yahoo properties via their API’s. YQL allows you to create mashups from Placemaker, Flickr Creative Commons, Maps, Upcoming and a bunch of others.

If YQL is a little too much for you, try Feevy for a much simpler (though far less malleable) solution. The user interface asks you to enter a list of feeds – Feevy then produces a few lines of javascript to include in your code.

Video keeps users engaged very well, try this Video API list for some ideas. You could try “Enriching your site with YouTube Direct” a tool launched in November 2009, built on top of YouTube’s public APIs that enables any developer to solicit video submissions on their website, powered by Youtube.

Many site owners have private API’s in development. It’s always worth contacting them to find out if there’s anything like that in the pipeline. Try to nurture a syndication deal if it’s in your mutual best interests to do so.

Display popular and related items in the same category

I enjoyed submitting a mobile phone review of the Nexus One to a product review site yesterday. I noted the blank review page had a number of features, including “related” products pulled through via an affiliate product feed, links to “top smartphones”, a price comparison section and even links to pages that do not yet have reviews!

Related internal links of all kinds will always improve your overall site indexation. Linking internally to pages that do not yet have unique content will grow your long tail traffic considerably, while protecting your architecture from orphaning large sections of content (or just not getting it indexed in the first place). This practice carries some risk to user experience, but provided that risk is mitigated through some of the techniques outlined in this post, the traffic gains far outweigh any problems caused elsewhere.

Display popular internal and external search referrals

What’s everyone else doing on the site? Displaying internal links to popular search query results is a nice to have, and while offering a passing distraction to the wandering visitor, can also offer gains in passing PageRank to trending areas of the site. For extra points, you could consider showing how people have found your site and for which terms, taken from the server logs on the host. This method has the added benefit of allowing for a rich variety of targeted internal anchors to appear on your site.

Display latest comments made on other UGC items on the site

We can learn a lot from the blogging community, many of my favourite WordPress based blogs have their internal link structures nailed. Most recent comments is a great example, but popular pages, latest posts, the correct use of tagging and sensible category links all help too. Displaying the most recent comments made on your site is great, and displaying most relevant comments is a very neat trick.

Use Twitter feeds

Similarly to to the practice aggregating and displaying latest comments, pulling data through from your Twitter stream could make a lot of sense. It’s common practice to display what your brand is saying on Twitter (SEOgadget does exactly this over in the blog sidebar) but far less common to see what people are saying about your brand. Mentions of your brand name, retweets of items your brand has posted and the like. I suppose it wouldn’t be too difficult to feature tweets from brand advocates, regulars who mention your brand often and become trusted members of your community.

Don’t plaster “there are currently no product reviews” all over the page

This just in: users don’t want to see a page like this – they’ll leave, instantly. If you can’t enhance your site beyond a certain point, it might be better just to set your page template to noindex,follow if you can’t find anything to put on the page. I think this is an extreme example though – there’s always something more to do and another idea round the corner. It’s arguable that terms such as “out of stock” or, “this vacancy has been filled” might trip red flags with the search engines. I tend to agree with ideas like this, though potentially only when you’re under review for something much worse than the odd blank page.

Don’t have any deals? Send the traffic to a site that has

Having been heavily involved in travel SEO for the last two years, I can tell you quite reliably that travel sites either have a lot more a lot less product data than you’d hope. If you’ve got an architecture that really rocks on long tail perfromance then you might see conversion problems emerging if you don’t have the product coverage. If you’ve got the traffic though, think about developing partnerships that end with the user choosing from a number of “product partners”, partners that may well have the product available.

Just make the page useful

We’ve established your page might not have any reviews, but you can still work to make the page useful. My price comparision background tells me that consumers will choose to return to a page with plenty of deals coverage, even if all else fails. On that note, getting as many merchants on your site as possible, with price data, date published brand logos all add to the usefulness of the page while serving to reduce the bounce rate and as a result, improving the conversion potential.

Handling Blank Review Pages for Better Traffic and Conversion is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.

Recently, though, Lindsay and I were faced with a tough call on a consulting project. The client has a site that receives a ton of search queries, many of which map to their category and subcategory level pages (which are more landing pages than search query pages, but also serve to address the search keywords). The client also has a number of search pages that have no content (either because they’re for mis-typed, nonsense or mis-spelled searches or because they simply don’t have content for those terms). Some of these pages earn links, some get a moderate amount of traffic and up until recently, they’ve essentially existed as error pages that resolve with a 200 code.

We don’t want the search engines wasting bandwidth crawling and indexing junk pages (especially since the site is monstrous and needs that crawl/index power to flow to the right sections). We also don’t want users to have a bad experience and while the error pages effectively communicate the right message (there’s no results for this query), semantically the pages should really 404.

I started writing a comment on this post but very quickly realised that it was worth a blog post all on its own. I find this subject really interesting in large site architecture SEO so it’s great to have the inspiration to put pen to paper fingers on keyboards. Let me summarise my findings from the excerpt above.

In short:

1) We’re talking about a large website where crawl bandwidth used by search engines is an issue

2) There are a lot of “junk” pages – blank / expired content pages (I’m going to assume there was content available at these URLs once)

3) Some of those junk pages may once have earned links

Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO?

When a web page returns a “404 not found” response, the web server is saying the page no longer exists. Do that enough and you’ll quickly see your page drop out of the index of most search engines. Google’s been round the block enough times to see many sites returning 404 errors but I’ve always felt that a large number of 404 errors are the last thing you want if you’re trying to give a an indicator to the search engines on the quality of your website.

Let’s remember that 404 errors stick around for a long time in Webmaster Tools – just because they appear to have dropped out of the index doesn’t mean they’re not being requested and continuing to soak up bandwidth.

Can the total number of 404 errors being returned be some kind of quality indicator to search engines?

Think signal to noise ratio. What if, suddenly, 40% of your indexed pages return a 404 error? What does that say about the way you manage your website? Could a large increase in error state pages give a signal to Google that you’re having problems with your website? Could the total number of error state pages influence crawl rate? I’m not saying that you’ll see your rankings or traffic drop in this scenario, but I am saying that in my opinion, we should avoid 404 errors if there’s an alternative.

An alternative to 404 errors on a large architecture site

Let’s return to the scenario outlined in the SEOmoz post and quotes summarised above. We have a large website with a content churn problem. I define content churn as the process of large amounts of content pages expiring, and subsequently returning 404 errors or large numbers of pages that respond with a 200 response but serve only some or none of the original content, including meta code. I covered this at SMX London 2009 in “Diagnosing Website Architecture Issues“.

Content churn in action

It’s pretty easy to find examples of content churn out in the wild. Particulary in the recruitment and retail industries. Try using the search query: intitle:”expired vacancy” or intitle:”product no longer available” and you’ll see what I mean. Because of obvious SEO and user experience issues, Rand is totally right to seek out a solution for pages like this one:

Solving the content churn and links problem

My advice is, don’t expire the pages and keep the original content live on the site. Of course you have the user experience problem, but you also have a data base full of items, jobs or general content that is in some way relevant to the user’s search query. Build the ability to display related or popular items on the “expired page” – perhaps in the form of a suggestion that keeps the visitor happy and interested in what your site has to offer:

If you’re linking to currently stocked, related items from your expired content pages then the links you’ve earned can pass value to deep sections of your architecture, via the anchor text you’ve specified.

Crawl bandwidth – If-Modified-Since

Has the page not changed for a long time? Are those links you’ve added not changing very frequently? Google’s request header contains the If-Modified-Since header which sends the date and time of the last crawl of that URL. If your webpage hasn’t been updated, then your server can be configured to respond with a 304 not modified response, and all of that crawl bandwidth is saved for another page. If you have a lot of indexed URLs, this could save a fortune in bandwidth costs!

More on If-Modified-Since

If-Modified-Since (Conditional Get) has been ably covered in the SEO, PHP developers and ASP .net developers blogosphere. Here are some resources to find out more:

Http/1.1 Definition at W3.org

Save bandwidth costs: Dynamic pages can support If-Modified-Since – Sebastians Pamphlets

Patrick Sexton at SEOish.com explains: What is a If-Modified-Since HTTP Header?

Google asking us to “make sure” the response is implemented in their Webmaster Guidelines

Conditional GET and ETag implementation for ASP.NET by J.A. García Barceló

The HttpWebRequest.IfModifiedSince Property – the .net Framework class library that Gets or sets the value of the If-Modified-Since HTTP header.

Implementing HTTP 304: Not Modified in PHP

This should keep your development team happy for a while. Good luck!

Using If-Modified-Since and better expired content to avoid 404's is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.