Company Gold Star Rating and Reviews in SERP

[Anmol]

I have been trying to find out how this company is able to show gold review stars for their website. I understand Yelp and Google My Business profiles will show gold stars, but this company is showing it for their actual website. Take a look at the screen shot. Does anyone know how they are able to accomplish this?

 

[Dustybones]

If you look on " /reviews" of his website you will see he has a ton of reviews on the site. He is using a review schema. Google reads this as a review and can show stars in SERPS. I've been using it, but have had no success. It obviously takes having 600 reviews on a page to trigger that. He is also separating each review into its own page. Nice little tactic. Thanks for sharing...

 

[Linda Buquet]

Yes for awhile it was fairly easy to get review stars to show up.

For awhile we could even get double stars in the pack - the Google stars PLUS organic stars.

But now it's really hard to get stars to show. I'll try to look later but I doubt it's just the volume. Maybe some trick. For instance for awhile after review stars stopped showing, if you ran a script that rotated reviews they would show. I think to Googlebot it would look like there was a fresh new review every time it hit the page. But then that stopped working too I think.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Actually I got curious and could not resist.

Rotation is exactly what they are doing. Hit refresh on the page and a new review comes up each time.

However I'm not seeing any kind of review schema or rotation script in the code. There is other schema but the reviews are just wrapped in a blockquote and that's all.

Can anyone that more of a coding genius than I am (not) figure out how they are marking up and rotating those reviews??? I just took a quick peek but could not see it.

www DOT billhowe DOT com/san-diego-plumber/

 

[ridgerunner]

I don't see the rotating reviews, but it look like the review page is set up like a blog and the reviews are blog comments and each review has the review schema markup.

 

[Linda Buquet]

No sorry. Talking about the home page.

Hit refresh on home and you'll see the reviews keep changing.
I believe that's what's triggering the stars.

But on home I don't see review markup or a rotation script, so how is it doing that?

 

[Dustybones]

Ok. I've been up since 2:30 Am...I'm not seeing the reviews on the home page.

 

[Linda Buquet]

One big one shows, toward bottom of page. Hit refresh it changes.

They aren't all from their review page either. Some are from Angies List, etc.

 

[Anmol]

Thanks for the revert. Is there any other way with which I can achieve this star rating without adding bulk of reviews? Perhaps we can change the website code to enable it to show the ratings?

 

[Dino]

Anmol and I have been trying to figure this one out with no success. Digging into it more...

Also of note: Almost 700 reviews on the website with an average 5 out of 5 star rating; 130 in Yelp and average is 3 stars; only 19 reviews in Google with 3.5 average rating. Gee, something doesn't seem quite right here...trying to put my finger on it...hmm...

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I didn't take a long look but it looks like the same schema markup that Yelp has, which is schema.org.

He is using a WP plugin to generate those reviews is my guess.

Schema reviews still work. I have them implemented for all of my clients. As you can see, Yelp has them as well as other local search directories.

 

[Linda Buquet]

But a lot of indiv businesses have schema reviews that stopped showing quite some time ago. Directories still have stars but not businesses usually unless you are doing something trick.

I want to know how those reviews are showing on home and rotating if I can't see any code that's doing it.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

The review schema is not showing on the homepage.

He has implemented it (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http://www.billhowe.com/)

But it is not showing (site:billhowe.com)

Google will not show review schema for homepages because they aren't allowing you to vote for a website as a whole. Review schema is a mark up language for mostly products and services. We're just adapting it to local businesses. With that in mind, Google views a homepage as not representative of a product or service but as a representative of the website as a whole. If they allowed schema on homepages, that would basically be people voting for the website as a whole, not the website's main service or product.

All of billhowe's schema is inner pages, which makes sense to Google.

There is no trick, just mark up your inner pages and they will show.

http://schema.org/Review

 

[Dino]

Right Linda, I have review mark up for all of my clients as well with "real" reviews, and they don't show up with stars in search.

1. Mine aren't rotated so that could have something to do with it.
2. None of my clients have nearly 695 reviews; however,
3. My clients have "real" reviews so they'd show up from different IPs.
4. My clients don't have a specific page dedicated to each review - it's not in a blog format as ridgerunner noticed with BH.

I think you're right, there's some trick going on that they've figured out. Also, not sure if this is important, but the resources page...

http : // www DOT billhowe DOT com/resources/

...has every localized keyword in the book listed for plumbing, heating and air conditioning. Each keyword in that long list is a link to another page specifically about that topic - with a rotating review at the end.

Got to hand it to them, each page has unique, well-written content. And refreshing each of those pages will render a new review.

 

[MChuckGreen]

You should be able to include just 1 review on the page in schema language and get the stars to display in search. I have had success with this for several clients.

Just make sure the review matches the product/service that the page discusses.

Here is a schema.org review code generator if you're interested:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DgKzCCwt9EGhVK0dwFjPVs8u5DylX6IiFePErbhJIk4/edit?usp=sharing

 

[Linda Buquet]

The review schema is not showing on the homepage.

Google will not show review schema for homepages because they aren't allowing you to vote for a website as a whole. Review schema is a mark up language for mostly products and services. We're just adapting it to local businesses. With that in mind, Google views a homepage as not representative of a product or service but as a representative of the website as a whole. If they allowed schema on homepages, that would basically be people voting for the website as a whole, not the website's main service or product.

All of billhowe's schema is inner pages, which makes sense to Google.

There is no trick, just mark up your inner pages and they will show.

SORRY TYPO...

Sorry I didn't mean home page - I meant that local landing page for San Diego.

www DOT billhowe DOT com/san-diego-plumber/

 

[cdawg2610]

In terms of the stars for a page, yes it's still possible - we use a widget that loads them in on any page, and we get the stars. The widget is marked up with the Schema Review.

Looking at the source code, he's got the Reviews and Business Schema in the footer, but Displayed None with the span CSS so its not viewable.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks cdawg. That explains a lot.

I was only looking at that San Diego page source code. Didn't check footer.
But in the footer makes sense so then the review schema would work on any page of site.

Would still like to know how they are rotating reviews on that page though.

Maybe the script is hidden in that quote tag. Meant to check CSS but didn't have time yet.

 

[Anmol]

Thanks, Dawg, that makes a lot of sense. I don't suppose you'd like to share that widget with us?

 

[accessted]

Thanks, Dawg, that makes a lot of sense. I don't suppose you'd like to share that widget with us?

Thats what I was thinking