Oh My Stars! Are Google Review Stars Changing Colors?

[Linda Buquet]

There are reports of green, gray and red Google review stars in the SERPs according to Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable.

<a href="https://www.seroundtable.com/green-google-rating-review-stars-19067.html">Google Switching Rating Stars From Gold/Orange To Green</a>

He shows screenshots of the various colored stars that are being reported.

Google. Testing. Always testing...

Anyone seeing different colors?

 

[Dino]

I'm partial to red...

 

[Linda Buquet]

Haha good one.

"Dino says, since I live at this forum, I've been seeing Red stars all along!"

 

[HurricaneK8]

I wish they would put their resources towards more useful things.... The orange stars are fine!
The green looks yucky.
And the red is good in the ads section to further seperate ads from organic search results.

Rainbow stars would be nice, however. I'm ok with that.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Totally agree Kate. The green look terrible to me too. And gray would blend too much.

Gold or red would be my vote.

 

[Jon Hall]

Just weird. I agree with many of the sentiments expressed here. Of course, Google will almost certainly agree with the click-thru data, which may or may not agree with us!

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Interesting they even tested green and red, in light of UX.
First thing that comes to mind is the red/green colourblind factor. What colour would they look like to those people?
And then there's the cultural norm of red typically the colour of danger or warning.

I can't help but think these colours will go the way of authorship photos.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Lots of folks on G+ tonight, including Phil Rosek are reporting seeing different colored stars again.

I'm still seeing orange, but a Dentist today was seeing blue. Phil is seeing gray. BLAH!

What color are you seeing?

 

[Scott Rawlins]

I'm still seeing orange.

 

[Nikki Brown]

For the most part I see orange but there have been a few cases of green, red, and yellow (screenshots below). I also noticed grey...but not for local results. The grey stars are usually for the organic results (I've seen it a few times with yelp).

The strange thing with the different coloured local stars is that the first time I saw them I asked my colleague to do the same search from her computer and she saw them as orange.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for the shots Nikki!

Yes many seeing them say they are gone when the do the next search even if minutes later so I think it depends which datacenter you hit.

Rotating datacenters again. They like to keep us guessing don't they?

 

[Nikki Brown]

@ Linda - Yes the certainly do! I was just trying to find the gray stars again (I forgot to take a screenshot when I saw them) and they are nowhere to be found. Just for fun I tried the searching the terms that brought up coloured stars last time and you are right, they are back to orange!

 

[Tim Colling]

Could it be that this may have something to do with how you are (or are not) logged into Google?

The Google account that I use most of the time is a Google Apps account tied to a non-SEO business that I own. When I am logged into that account I see only orange stars.

I also see only orange stars for when I am logged into Google from my wife's account on that same Google Apps domain, and also when I am logged into Google from other "personal" gmail accounts that I own.

When I am logged into Google with that account AND using an "incognito" Chrome session, I currently am seeing Google review stars with the color #4536B1, a sort of purple.

Could that be a clue?

 

[Nikki Brown]

Could it be that this may have something to do with how you are (or are not) logged into Google?

The Google account that I use most of the time is a Google Apps account tied to a non-SEO business that I own. When I am logged into that account I see only orange stars.

I also see only orange stars for when I am logged into Google from my wife's account on that same Google Apps domain, and also when I am logged into Google from other "personal" gmail accounts that I own.

When I am logged into Google with that account AND using an "incognito" Chrome session, I currently am seeing Google review stars with the color #4536B1, a sort of purple.

Could that be a clue?

I just tested this out for myself and I found that being signed into an account had no effect on the star colour (for me anyways). I searched the same terms as I did before when I did see coloured stars and they all show up as orange now, whether I'm signed in or not.
However, when I searched the same terms with an "incognito" window in Chrome all the stars showed as red. I did the same search with a "private window" in FF and the stars were orange again.

I think Linda is right in that it just depends on what data center your results come from.