Author: Chris Hüneke

This script was basically the concept for a similar WP Plugin, which automatically counts the amount of all single product ratings in each category and writes the correct amount of total reviews in a category on the category pages "aggregate rating" Schema.org Markup.

We had a case, where this was the optimal solution to display the correct amount of "aggregate rating" in "Recipe Rich Results" for a Foodblog/Recipe-Website.

As for today, Google does not seem to give to much attention, but there are indicators showing, the math is getting more important.

This script extracts the total number of reviews from all categories listed in a sitemap and saves the results to a file. It is specifically designed to work with webpages where review counts are displayed in a specific format (e.g., "(123)").

Run the Script: Replace placeholders (https://example.com/category-sitemap.xml) with the actual URL of the sitemap. Execute the script in a Python environment.
Output: The total reviews per category are saved in result.txt.

Python libraries: requests, beautifulsoup4, re.

Review Format: This script is suitable for webpages where the number of reviews is enclosed in parentheses, such as "(123)". It uses a regular expression to identify and extract these numbers.

# scrape_review_count.py
# Author: Christopher Hneke
# Date: 04.08.2024
# Description: This script extracts the total number of reviews from all categories listed in a sitemap and saves the results to a file. 
# Description: It is specifically designed to work with webpages where review counts are displayed in a specific format (e.g., "(123)").

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re

# Function to get the total number of reviews from a category URL
def get_total_reviews(url):
    total_reviews = 0
    page_number = 1
    review_pattern = re.compile(r'\((\d+)\)')

    while True:
        page_url = f"{url}/page/{page_number}/" if page_number > 1 else url
        response = requests.get(page_url)

        if response.status_code == 404:
            break

        soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')
        page_reviews = soup.find_all(string=review_pattern)

        if not page_reviews:
            break

        for review_text in page_reviews:
            match = review_pattern.search(review_text)
            if match:
                total_reviews += int(match.group(1))

        page_number += 1

    return total_reviews

# Main function to process the sitemap and extract reviews for each category
def main():
    sitemap_url = 'https://example.com/category-sitemap.xml'  # Replace with the actual sitemap URL
    response = requests.get(sitemap_url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'xml')
    categories = soup.find_all('loc')

    results = []

    for category in categories:
        category_url = category.text
        category_name = category_url.split('/')[-2]
        print(f"Processing category: {category_name}")
        total_reviews = get_total_reviews(category_url)
        results.append(f"{category_name}: {total_reviews} reviews\n")

    with open('result.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as file:
        file.writelines(results)

    print("Results saved to result.txt")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Back in the days Google's Disavow Tool could be useful to disavow spammy backlinks, which competitors created to hurt the rankings of a website.

Negative SEO and Spamlink-attacks were (and are) real and can cause serious damages to businesses relying on Google's Organic Search as a Traffic Source.

Of course, also Spammers and Blackhat-SEO's made heavy use of this tool to simply "recover" their sites from penalties, they have caused themselves, when buying toxic backlinks.

My theory is, that the Disavow-Tool was/is used by Blackhats way more frequently than by Whitehat SEOs. And Google therefore might have slightly changed the function of it.

For example, many Backlinksellers advertise like this to calm their potential clients: "In case of consequences, there's Google's Disavow tool, so no worries".

I directly confronted John Muller (Search Advocate at Google) with this - you can see his response in the attached image. He obviously dodged my question, but sometimes no answer can be an answer too, right?

There's an very interesting case study on Reddit on this and i have a lot more info, which i will try to put into an article on DaniWeb this weekend.

I have found a lot of answers for many questions, but on still remains...

Does the Disavow Tool still help to recover a website's lost rankings caused by spammy links?

Or does it nowadays hurt the rankings of a site even more, because Google lets it as kind of a "honeypot" for Blackhatters, which try to recover from the penalties they caused themselves?

If anybody has something to share about this, would be very appreciated.

Thanks for your attention,
Chris