Do Some Industries Never Get Organic Gold Stars?

[JoyHawkins]

I was talking to a client today who has correctly implemented review aggregate schema and the site looks perfect if you run it through the Rich Snippit tool. It also shows the stars when you do a site:domain.com search.

However, when you search the keywords he ranks for, there are no stars. He interestingly noticed that all his competitors also don't have stars. In fact, Yelp and Facebook don't have stars either.

The industry he's in is staffing agency/temporary agency.

Search any combination of staffing agency + city and I can't find a single listing with stars organically.

Is it possible that Google refrains from showing stars for certain industries?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Joy you always ask such great questions!

I have not looked into this but am anxious to hear what others have to say.

 

[alakov]

Yelp has 1 star for randstad

 

[alakov]

As far as on-site review schema is concerned, you probably right, some industries do not get stars from it. I have not seen a single car dealership with stars coming from schema. Although, iframing reviews from an industry focused review site seem to work for that. So, I do have a few dealers who have "customer review" pages ranking for "dealer name" + "reviews", and showing stars in search.

 

[timcapper]

Never ever looked at recruitment and I cant find any showing review rich snippets in the UK ..... interesting

 

[timcapper]

Just asked John Mu and he is not aware of any filter being applied to industry. He did say that they don't like if the review markup is sitewide or on irrelevant pages. Also they don't like if testimonials are used within the markup.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Let me ask Greg Gifford if he has ever seen them in auto.

 

[Greg Gifford]

 

[Greg Gifford]

Yep - we see it in Auto, cause we put the schema on our sites... but it's not review schema only, it's product markup (which includes reviews).

We feed in reviews of the specific model from Edmunds.com, then put product markup on the car and include the reviews OF THAT PRODUCT...

even then, it doesn't show up 100% of the time - but it shows more often than not, and obviously it stands out...

when you try to do it just with reviews of the business, it doesn't work...

 

[alakov]

Thanks Greg, I meant business review stars. I do see product-related stars.
P.S. there is a way to add business review starts. Not ideal.

 

[whitespark]

My thinking is that there is not a filter on this industry (or any industry). I think that the reason we're not seeing stars in this industry are:

• This isn't a particularly SEO savvy industry. Not many businesses will have added the markup.
• You need to have decent domain authority for the stars to show.
• The aggregate schema is easy to mess up. Many people implement it incorrectly and don't get the stars. The JSON version is so much easier. We have a post on our site about it.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Okay I think it's safe to say it's not the industry

What I noticed with this guy (we implemented review schema) is that when you search a keyword, the stars don't show HOWEVER when you search site:www.hissite.com you see the review schema and also it's correct when you look at the rich snippit tool.

Does anyone know why that might be? I'm perfectly fine with PM'ing anyone the site if they want to have a look.

 

[whitespark]

That tells me it's a domain authority issue. Just not enough authority to push those stars. Also, the schema shouldn't be on the homepage or site-wide. If it's the homepage that's ranking, and not a subpage, then that would also explain it.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Joy

What brother Darren said. Also, as he alluded to, a homepage never gets rich-snippet review stars. Hasn't for about 4 years now.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Thanks guys. We definitely didn't add any to the homepage. Just the location pages.

 

[whitespark]

In that case, it's probably a lack of page authority (links). Look for opportunities for better internal linking to those pages, and see if you can get some external links to them.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Hey Joy,

Any update on this? Still nothing?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Hey Joshua,

I kind of stopped looking into it but the business I was initially looking at still doesn't have the gold stars. I think it's probably due to what Darren said - their site lacks authority.