Your Star Review In Google Search
Result Might Soon Vanish!
If you don’t see your star review all of a sudden without any prior warning… This is why!
Google announced on Monday 16 September 2019 it has applied “algorithmic updates” to audit the rich snippets. This will address issues such as the misleading implementation of the snippets.
To put it plainly, Google is now only showing reviews for the following rich results:
- A clear set of schema types for review snippets
- Non “self-serving” reviews
- Reviews that have the name property within the markup
While, technically, you can attach review markup to any schema type, for many types displaying star reviews does not add much value for the user. With this change, Google is limiting the pool of schema types that can potentially trigger review rich results in search. Specifically, they will only be displaying reviews with those types (and their respective subtypes):
- schema.org/Book
- schema.org/Course
- schema.org/CreativeWorkSeason
- schema.org/CreativeWorkSeries
- schema.org/Episode
- schema.org/Event
- schema.org/Game
- schema.org/HowTo
- schema.org/LocalBusiness
- schema.org/MediaObject
- schema.org/Movie
- schema.org/MusicPlaylist
- schema.org/MusicRecording
- schema.org/Organization
- schema.org/Product
- schema.org/Recipe
- schema.org/SoftwareApplication
Self-serving reviews aren’t allowed for LocalBusiness and Organization
Reviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” are seen as A is placed on the website of entity A – either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget.
With this change, Google is not going to display review rich results anymore for the schema types LocalBusiness and Organization (and their subtypes) in cases when the entity being reviewed controls the reviews themselves.
Add the name of the item that’s being reviewed
With this update, the name property is now required, so you’ll want to make sure that you specify the name of the item that’s being reviewed.
This update will help deliver a much more meaningful review experience for users while requiring little to no changes on the part of most webmasters. You can find all those updates documented in our developer documentation.
If your pages on your site show review rich results, i.e. the stars, in the search results, then you will want to make sure they continue to show these stars. Review these new rules, make sure your pages and schema markup comply with these rules and if they do, you should be okay. If your review rich results disappear today or in the near future, it is likely related to this new algorithmic update around review rich results.
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