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Starting a review site and dealing with inevitable thin content

by Kasparov67
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi all,

I've worked for several prominent review websites you've likely heard of. However, they all had a bit of momentum by the time I helped out, and, in particular, launched well before Google's distaste for thin content came into play.

Launching one of these sites today, thousands of reviewable products or services are going to have zero reviews with the pages being 99% boilerplate. How best to deal with this?

At the moment, to avoid any thin content penalties, I'm leaning towards putting a no-index (but follow) tag to the effectively empty pages and keeping them out of the site map, and having this automatically reversed once a review is written for the product.

Any thoughts on whether this is advisable, or if there is a better alternative?

Thanks in advance
#boilerplate #content #dealing #google #inevitable #review #reviews #site #starting #thin #thin content
  • Profile picture of the author Oziboomer
    I'd of kinda thought any *new* site would be thin on legit reviews so where's the problem?

    If it's product reviews couldn't you add some from Amazon or elsewhere?

    It it is just paid reviews to fill the site then fiverr has review gigs or hire some outsourcers to write reviews.

    But that sort of brings me back to if it's new what is a natural growth pattern and wouldn't a natural acquisition of reviews be desirable hence not worrying about indexing and focusing more on generating sales and then reviews?
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    • Profile picture of the author Kasparov67
      Thanks for the response,

      The problem would be because Google will recognise that there's tens of thousands of pages that are the same except for a few differences -- basically boiler plate -- which since Panda Google will have marked as low quality thin content (which is fair if there are no reviews, but the idea is that it won't be that way permanently) and that starts to affect the main domain's ranking.

      I could potentially take reviews from elsewhere, but I would almost certainly get punished for duplicate content.

      I may go down the route of paying people to review a selection of products to get started so there are several pages, but without bags of money I wouldn't be able to make a dent into the amount of pages needing content without filling them ended up filled with nonsense.

      For the record, the site is more in the way of Rotten Tomatoes or TripAdvisor, so not trying to sell a product directly. The reviews are the content.

      I'm fine with acquiring them naturally, just what to do with them until they start accumulating content?
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