Google's New Announcement About Review Schema

[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.

 

[BipperMedia]

Thank you @kathleen.rhodes for pointing out those link issues... I really appreciate it.

Bobby

 

[Justin Mosebach]

For what it's worth, Bing is still showing review stars in the SERPs.

So, the Review Schema could still be helpful to have.

 

[kathleen.rhodes]

Thank you @kathleen.rhodes for pointing out those link issues... I really appreciate it.

Bobby

A belated "thanks" for the "thanks." I'm impressed with what you're doing for your clients and appreciate the posts.

 

[BipperMedia]

A belated "thanks" for the "thanks." I'm impressed with what you're doing for your clients and appreciate the posts.

those are very kind and encouraging words... thank you so much @kathleen.rhodes

 

[nwinezog]

Has anyone noticed a reduction in stars in the SERPs? I am still seeing some client competitors with obvious self-serving reviews still have the stars.

 

[gyitsakalakis]

Has anyone noticed a reduction in stars in the SERPs? I am still seeing some client competitors with obvious self-serving reviews still have the stars.

Most gone in my world, but a few competitors do still have them. Seems like an odd thing to be enforced so inconsistently.

 

[JoyHawkins]

*Most* got removed near the end of September.

 

[nwinezog]

Is there any downside to trying to go after them again, worst case scenario you just don't get them right?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Ya no downside IMO. Go for it.

 

[davematson]

I still see far too many of these in competitors. I am thinking about adding the schema in, which seems ridiculous, yet it bugs me so much to see others with them in the serps.

 

[ChrisP]

It does frustrate me to see Google results show 5 star rich snippets for the competition when after checking their code, I can clearly see they inserted it manually. So what do I do?

Report them to Google!

https://support.google.com/webmasters/contact/rich_snippets_spam
Time consuming but very helpful.



Chris