Review Snippet Stars Gone

[Scott ClientClicks]

Last week, I found that a few sites I manage lost their star rankings that formerly appeared in the serps.

For one site, the snippets were appearing on the testimonials page for many years, but are now gone. I recently read an article on seroundtable.com that talks about a recent crackdown in the display of rich snippets. So I'm guessing that the loss is an algo penalty related to the crackdown.

There were no manual penalties reported in GSC. Also the sites I manage don't show any errors when validating in the structured data testing tool.

Have any of the sites you manage lost your stars? If so, do you use a particular review plugin or service?

I found a few service oriented sites that still show their stars in the serps. These sites use the following techniques:

• JSON markup
• review stream plugin from grade.us
• schema.org aggregate markup, but with itemtype incorrectly set to product instead of service

I was hoping we can share what is still working and compliant with Google's policies.

 

[regl8r]

I just came on here to post that I am seeing no more stars for Yelp for the most part in the serps. I have been waiting for this day for a long time really hope it sticks I hate Yelp!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Lots more details here:

<a href="https://blog.serps.com/217-ratings-snippet-update-slices-stars-yelp-facebook-imdb-amazon-survive/">2/17 Ratings Snippet Update Slices Stars For Yelp, Facebook. IMDB, Amazon Survive. - SERPs Blog</a>

 

[ToddB]

Using Grade.us we still have the stars

 

[JoyHawkins]

My one client that has always had them lost them on every inner page we had marked up with aggregate rating Schema.

I'm honestly not too surprised because I figured this was too good to last since it's really easy for people to make up fake reviews and then just mark them up to get review stars.

I'm noticing that some of the major brands that used to have them like Allstate Insurance & RotoRooter don't appear to anymore either.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Barry just reported:

<a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-looking-into-review-stars-dropping-out-of-the-search-results-243162">Google Looking Into Review Stars Dropping Out Of The Search Results</a>

 

[Dr GMap]

Yeah, the stars on my local SEO ranked page are gone I'll have to delete the plugin I guess...

 

[whitespark]

I'm seeing a lot of review stars coming back for yelp, facebook, yellowpages, homestars, avvo, etc. Barry's recent post has a postcript saying that he's seeing them return as well. I guess it was a bug, and not intentional. Woo!

 

[JoyHawkins]

I'm seeing them back for clients who lost them too. Whoo hoo!