Review Schema Mark up and Google My Business Reviews

[Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR]

Hello,

According to Google's Review Guideline: Review snippet | Google Search Central | Google Developers
I can use Review Structured Data for the Local Businesses, I believe we all know this.
But I wonder may I use Review Structured Data for the reviews within my GMB Account?
I have more than 300 Reviews for some of my Local SEO Customers. May I use these reviews for the homepage with a Review SD?

Thank you for your answers.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR, the short answer is yes, you can mark up Google reviews on your site with Schema.

Don't bother to do so on the homepage, though. Your review stars will not show up there, no matter what you do.

 

[Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR]

@Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR, the short answer is yes, you can mark up Google reviews on your site with Schema.

Don't bother to do so on the homepage, though. Your review stars will not show up there, no matter what you do.

Thank you for the answer, maybe I can use the "About" page or any other important service page for this task. Do you have a "live-example" that uses the GMB Reviews with Review SD at the moment?

 

[Tiggerito]

I'd read the review guidelines related to Local Businesses. I don't think using GMB reviews on your own site will make you eligible for rich snippets.

Review Snippet (Review, AggregateRating) Structured Data | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers

A review snippet is a short excerpt of a review or rating. Explore this guide to learn about Google review snippets and how to enable rich snippets.

developers.google.com

If the review snippet is for a local business or an organization, you must follow these additional guidelines:

• Pages using LocalBusiness or any other type of Organization structured data are ineligible for star review feature if the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself. For example, a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A, either directly in their structured data or through an embedded third-party widget.
• Ratings must be sourced directly from users.
• Don't rely on human editors to create, curate, or compile ratings information for local businesses; instead, use critic review structured data.
• Sites must collect ratings information directly from users and not from other sites.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR, in-the-wild examples are extremely rare these days. Pretty much all of the sites I know of that had marked-up reviews no longer have review stars showing up in the search results. (I'm talking about clients' sites and others' sites.)

It's because those sites don't still have the markup. Most of them do. The issue is that Google seems to have stopped handing out review stars to just about every site that is not a directory / review site. I used to mark up clients' Google and Yelp and other reviews, and get review stars showing up. It was great.

But I stopped marking up clients' review several years ago, because there didn't seem to be any payoff anymore. That was right around the time the great AJ Kohn wrote this: The Rich Snippets Algorithm

What he describes in the post seems to have come to fruition. Review stars are rare now, even if you do everything "by the book."

Here is an example of business that marks up its reviews (not 100% properly) and has the review stars showing in the search results: site:jeffreysglassman.com