Can search engines see your social commerce content?

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By Kat Matfield

28 June 2011

The experts have spoken, and the data backs them up: user-generated social commerce content can be a fantastic SEO asset.

But - and this is a big 'but' - reviews and other social content will only help your SEO if search engines can see it.

This sounds common sense, but far too many people assume that anything users can see will be seen and valued by search engines. Sadly, it's not that simple.

If you're only putting reviews on your site with iframes, Flash, images or JavaScript, then you won't get any SEO benefit. If you're not certain whether your reviews are being inadvertently hidden from Google by any of these technologies, there's a simple way to check.

How to find out if search engines can see your social commerce content

  1. Find a page on your site which includes social commerce content.
  2. Search Google for exactly that page: I recommend using the name of your site and the title of the page as keywords. For instance, to get the example below I searched for "Jessops Canon EOS 1000D"
  3. In the Google search result page, click "Cached" under the entry for the page you're after. Finding the Google cached version of a page
  4. Compare what you see in this view with what you see when you access that page normally. If you can't see your social commerce content in the cached view, it's being ignored by search engines and you're not getting any SEO benefits.

Here's what happens when your content isn't visible to a search engine:

The reviews on Comet appear to users (left-hand view) - but not to Google and the other search engines (right-hand view). Because they're put on the page using JavaScript, they're simply ignored by search engines. Without these reviews, there's barely any unique, natural language content left on the page - bad news for SEO.

Comet reviews Jessops reviews are visible to the user but aren't seen by search engines

And this is what it looks like when your content is visible to a search engine:

Jessops are using our Traffic tool to make sure they have reviews that are visible to search engines as well as users - and it's working perfectly on this page.

Jessops reviews are visible to the user and to search engines

Hat tip to an excellent post focusing on US sites using reviews, which inspired this quick how-to guide.