Google's New Announcement About Review Schema

[pony]

And now there's the FAQ markup which, in some ways, I think helps make the listing stand out even more definitively in search.

And I'm assuming that Google's long term play here with FAQ markup is voice search...

i.e. extracting FAQ markup to present via voice search results.

I think that is a very accurate prediction. I feel like Google is teasing SEO's with FAQ schema right now which makes us salivate looking at all of the SERP real estate, giving them a huge head start on better voice search results for their users in the near future.

But, I feel like the FAQ schema rich results cannot last very long... they already take up a huge amount of real estate without full adoption, and more and more people are adding it everyday. Soon every page will have it and Google will be required to make a change.

 

[BipperMedia]

@BipperMedia Edit: Nevermind... answered my own question. Thanks.

Yep... best practices from within Google's documentation would state that the FAQ's you are marking up would be present on the page.

 

[marthavanberkel]

We've definitely seen schema-related penalties in the last year. It's generally when review schema is present without the physical reviews showing on the page anywhere. Every single one I've looked at simply removes the gold stars in the SERPs and has no impact on ranking.

Joy, we have seen similar penalties for reviews and ratings over the last three years. It was always about content missing on the page and schema markup being present.

 

[marthavanberkel]

We started seeing rating rich results (ie. stars) start to disappear yesterday. What is interesting is that we saw the rich results for BlogPosting, Article, NewsArticle, and Services also disappear. These were rich results that fell under the featured snippet documentation prior to May, but after that were removed.

I believe the intention for this change is to tighten up who gets review rich snippets to better inform searchers with real community validation. This is a good thing overall. They do mention in the clarification posted on the announcement on 9/18 that ratings for things like Recipes will still be shown because it is helpful to the user. From this standpoint, I think some of the other categories like BlogPosting, Article, etc may come back.

As for Local Business and Organization markup. For now it appears we need to focus on gathering reviews on 3rd party sites. Previously we had seen aggregate rating work on an Organization site that pointed to 3rd party, as they roll out this change we will continue to see if this is a option now.

We'll be publishing a post on our blog on Schema App's website if you want to stay up to date on our findings. I'll also try to chime in here when we see them.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Thanks for chiming in Martha. Please do share your article here when you post it - I'd love to read it.

@BipperMedia thanks for sharing those screenshots. Super helpful.

 

[BipperMedia]

Thanks for chiming in Martha. Please do share your article here when you post it - I'd love to read it.

@BipperMedia thanks for sharing those screenshots. Super helpful.

Thank you Joy! I appreciate the feedback

 

[LilyRayNYC]

We started seeing rating rich results (ie. stars) start to disappear yesterday. What is interesting is that we saw the rich results for BlogPosting, Article, NewsArticle, and Services also disappear. These were rich results that fell under the featured snippet documentation prior to May, but after that were removed.

I believe the intention for this change is to tighten up who gets review rich snippets to better inform searchers with real community validation. This is a good thing overall. They do mention in the clarification posted on the announcement on 9/18 that ratings for things like Recipes will still be shown because it is helpful to the user. From this standpoint, I think some of the other categories like BlogPosting, Article, etc may come back.

As for Local Business and Organization markup. For now it appears we need to focus on gathering reviews on 3rd party sites. Previously we had seen aggregate rating work on an Organization site that pointed to 3rd party, as they roll out this change we will continue to see if this is a option now.

We'll be publishing a post on our blog on Schema App's website if you want to stay up to date on our findings. I'll also try to chime in here when we see them.

Hey Martha, please update if you are seeing 3rd party reviews still working as a way to obtain stars. We have one client who used Trustpilot reviews on Local pages and is seeing stars disappear. John Mueller also indicated this would be the case.

 

[AndySimpson]

A great post from Mike and Aaron about the current issue...

Google and review snippets

 

[TyCarson]

I have done some testing to try and get the reviews back the past week with some success. There are a few questions you need to ask when looking at the site with the missing reviews.

I posted today about it.
Just jump to the section titled How to Fix Missing Google Reviews.

The following should be asked:

• Is the marked-up review contain content relevant to the page or is the review about the company in general?
• Is there another review that would make more sense for that page?
• Are reviews being shown through a third-party widget or manually added to the page or template?
• Are the reviews the same on every page?

The reviews being unique to the page has a large impact. Start there.

 

[JoyHawkins]

So far we haven't seen any clients lose stars. We have a mixture of clients who have GatherUp badges and some that we added manually (which are unique).

 

[Paul Kargo]

I think with this update, a lot of 3rd party review websites will get some attention they were looking for.

 

[AndySimpson]

So far we haven't seen any clients lose stars. We have a mixture of clients who have GatherUp badges and some that we added manually (which are unique).

Ditto! All legal, seeing no change as of this morning.

 

[pony]

Ditto! All legal, seeing no change as of this morning.

Same here, we haven't seen a single rich result drop from SERPs out of thousands of properties. I may have been a bit overly dramatic when I first read the release but I honestly don't think Google communicated this change all that well. Or I just suck at reading.

 

[nwinezog]

@pony

You don't suck at reading, it was communicated poorly and has left a lot of us trying to interpret this and communicate it to our clients/co-workers etc

 

[pony]

Had to stop by this thread to laugh at some of the results Google is still allowing to keep their aggregate rating rich results.

Those reviews are about their company, and have nothing to do with the page I am clicking through to. This markup also throws tons of warnings in Google's markup tester tool but no actual errors. I feel bad some people lost out while this gets to stay.

 

[LilyRayNYC]

I think they're rolling this out in waves. A bunch of companies lost their stars 2 days ago. Think it has less to do with "letting companies keep their stars" and more to do with "haven't gotten to that site yet."

 

[kathleen.rhodes]

ultimately all of this is fine by me... from my experience very few of our client's local business competitors even had review markup showing in organic results -- because most local business owners have no idea how to implement it

So long as they don't do away with the FAQ markup -- which in my opinion, at the moment anyway, delivers a much stronger presence in organic.

here's a screenshot from one of our clients that have both review and FAQ markup -- so remove the reviews, and you still own a large chunk of real estate...

Quick side not on this FAQ markup... it took us a total of about 2 minutes to add the markup > republish the site > re-crawl in GSC... and then BAM!!! the FAQ list was present in organic (kind of crazy and definitely wasn't expecting it to show that quickly).

My point here is, similar to what another commenter mentioned (sorry, can't remember who it was) but stuff like this comes and goes - and you just need to be on top of the changes to adapt and adjust accordingly...

I like what you did, so took a quick peek at the site. Unrelated to the FAQ info, I thought you'd want to know that the Get Directions and Leave a Review links aren't working properly (for me anyway) - I get 403 "Forbidden" errors.