Are reviews seen as SEO content or as user experience?

[avalon37]

I'm curious if you think Google views review content via rich snippets as valuable on page SEO content? #1 I guess a webmaster must make sure the structured data is setup correctly. And #2 is it valuable for improving SEO rankings? Do you think new reviews are "seen" as new content? Just curious if you think reviews should be part of the SEO content strategy or more the user experience?

[goodroi]

I think SEO and user experience are part of an integrated strategy. I wouldn't view them as separate issues.

Reviews can be a great source of useful and engaging content if handled propely. If you let it be a "free for all" with no rules you can end up with useless gibberish that takes away from SEO and user experience.

[martinibuster]

2015 Google On-page SEO Ranking Factors List [webmasterworld.com]
May 6, 2015

2015 Ranking factors
User experience metrics (all of them)
Shorter title tags
Original content
Engaging content that provides an answer, teaches, informs, is useful, delights
Original images
Quality site design
Descriptive meta description

Back in May it seemed I got a lot of pushback from the suggestion that User Experience Metrics were a top priority for SEO in 2015. Fact is that user experience has been a top priority for a couple years.

User Experience is not a metric in itself, but rather a set of metrics some negative and some positive that overall indicate a successful referral from a search engine to a website.

Review content could be seen as a value add, especially if it's unique. That's important because there is a trend toward rotating content, which in my opinion can undermine those efforts. There's a threshold of non-unique content that once crossed will put you into Panda territory. There's a percentage of unique content that is needed to keep you out and a clever way of calculating it that the search engines deploy.

Review content can help push your stock (and non-unique) product content out of the Panda non-unique content danger zone. So it's useful as an SEO approach, imo, for keeping out of Panda. And that relates to user experience because (imo) significant parts of Panda are related to user experience.

So if you go back to my list I published in May, this falls under the user experience metrics of original content and content that engages and delights users.