Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Review Schema Dropped Off A Cliff!?
-
Hello everyone,
I recently implemented some review schema for my website which looked to be successful as my review stars were appearing in organic rankings with no problem! Yay! However... I've just checked in on where we are with these and they have literally dropped off a cliff and I have no idea why.
See image attached with the graph that shows our reviews looking great in July/August then dropping off w/c 26th August. I literally have no idea why this has happened. The Schema Markup Tool shows no errors or issues with the markup either.
Can anyone advise?
-
Hi Virginia,
Looks like, yes, there are problematic practices going on here. I'm not an expert schema diagnostician, but I can offer you two suggestion that I believe should help.
-
Read fully through this article on schema markup best practices: https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-use-aggregate-review-schema-to-get-stars-in-the-serps/
-
If you get lost, hire David Deering's company TouchPoint Digital - http://www.touchpointdigitalmarketing.com/ - for some consulting. He's an absolute expert and can help you get your schema into guideline compliance.
I hope these resources are useful to you!
-
-
Looking into the guidelines further, I'm wondering if it's because I don't link through to checkatrade in my reviews. The other issue I'm having is the product in question are conservatory roofs. These are not products you can review on an individual item basis, as it's just one product (in two colour variations) but we don't have these all listed on the website. Instead, the reviews are about our customer service, building work and overall product review. To make this easier, this is our website: https://www.greenspaceconservatories.co.uk/ you'll see that we have info pages about our product, but we don't have product reviews. Just service reviews. Is this potentially causing a problem as well?
-
Overall traffic hasn't dropped, but organic dropped on 29th July from peaking at 232 down to 108 visits per day - which is when the Schema seems to have suddenly disappeared. But I'm guessing the drop in organic is because of the drop of visibility on the review schema, so not sure that helps me figure out what is going.
-
Hi Miriam,
Hmm maybe we have? I've put the schema markup on all pages - including the homepage - I couldn't see anything anywhere that said I couldn't do this? The platform that we have taken the reviews from has been from something called Checkatrade, but we don't reference that in the markup at all. We have the reviews dotted around the site and reference one or two on most landing pages, hence why we put the review markup across the site. We do have a testimonials section on our site which has more reviews on it, but these are added in via HTML as opposed to a widget pulling from the third party site (like the other dotted around the site). I can't see why this would be an issue though? Do I need to have links pointing back to the Checkatrade website for all reviews on the site for Google to validate my reviews?
Let me show you the markup and see if you can spot anything in there that I'm not seeing.
-
Have you also seen any impact in traffic during the same timeframe?
-
Hi Virginia,
Could you have done something to violate guidelines, like using schema markup on your website to mark up third party platform reviews or putting schema review markup on your homepage?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
BazaarVoice Paginated Reviews Not Honoring Canonical & Indexing Multiple Pages
If there are enough reviews on a product page to warrant page 2, 3 etc, BazaarVoice appends the below snippets to each new page of reviews, which are then also indexed, despite BazaarVoice SEO settings that automate a canonical tag (seemingly since the differing reviews on each page are not similar enough to honor the canonical). <cite class="iUh30">?bvstate=pg:2/ct:r</cite> <cite class="iUh30">?bvstate=pg:3/ct:r</cite> It seems Target.com has found a way to hack the BV code to create a dedicated page to view all reviews: https://www.target.com/p/ultra-soft-fitted-sheet-300-thread-count-threshold-153/-/A-13973172?showOnlyReview=true While Ikea.com blocks it in the Robots file (defeats SEO value) - Noindex: */catalog/products/bvroute=Review Noindex: */catalog/products/bvtab Tons of brands apparently have the issue, and you can see more examples if you search "inurl:bvstate=pg" Anyone aware of a solution to this?
Reviews and Ratings | | Eroc2 -
How and where to implement the AggregateRating schema?
I've been trying to wrap my head around marking up various bits of information for a local business website, and I want to make sure I understand a few things. If I understand Google's schema guidelines, marked up reviews should only appear on the page of a specific product, not every page, and _definitely _not the homepage, correct? Does this also mean that the LocalBusiness schema that is on every page should **not **use the AggregateRating parameter? And if the AR is only to be put on certain pages, what page should it go on if the business in question provides a service rather than selling specific products? In other words, situations where the local business _itself _is the "product" being reviewed/rated. Individual reviews cannot be taken from 3rd party sites (GMB, Facebook, Yelp, etc) and posted on your website with capital R Review schema (http://schema.org/Review). That markup is only to be used for reviews that have been generated on/for your site specifically. Does this also mean that the numbers used to calculate an AggregateRating have to be unique as well? In other words, if there are 10 reviews of your business on Facebook that average at 4.5/5, you can't take those individual reviews and post them on your site as marked up Reviews. But can you use that "4.5/5 based on 10 reviews" information in the AggregateRating schema? Can AggregateRating scores include ratings from different sources? In other words, if there were 10 ratings on Facebook and 20 on Yelp, could the AggregateRating be marked on the website as "__/5 based on 30 ratings"? If I can simply take the numerical average and pop that into the LocalBusiness JSON markup that goes on every page automatically, alongside the other basic business info like name, phone number, and address, this will make things much easier. Thanks!
Reviews and Ratings | | BrianAlpert782 -
What do the symbols in the profile avatars in Google listing reviews mean?
A client of mine noticed that some of their customers that leave GMB listing reviews have special symbols in their profile avatars (please look at the attachment). Is this a sign of a influencer? Has anybody else noticed this? r6mhX
Reviews and Ratings | | BigChad20 -
Schema Markup - Star Ratings
I'm trying to get the star ratings to appear next to our client's website in google search results. Here is the url:https://cstoneroof.com/ I believe I have it setup correctly but am unsure why the stars don't appear: structure data test here I pulled the rating value and count from Facebook. Not sure if it has to be Google reviews or if FB will work as well. Anybody have any thoughts here?
Reviews and Ratings | | a_toohill0 -
How many Google reviews can I collect at once?
I work for a University with 10,000+ students and alumni that could submit reviews. But how many reviews should I be collecting at one time? I don't want to overload the reviews and put up a red flag in Google...any insight on how much is too much?
Reviews and Ratings | | GabeGibitz0 -
How does decimal rounding of reviews to stars work in ios appstore? Starting from which average review score to get full 5 star rating?
How does decimal rounding of reviews to stars work in ios appstore?
Reviews and Ratings | | lcourse
Starting from which average review score to get full 5 star rating? Duolingo has a 5 star rating, but I doubt that they really have an all time review average larger than 4,75. In the google playstore their average of the android version is 4,6. Does anybody know how apple calculates the star ratings or has an URL reference where this is explained?0 -
Blocking Reviews by Blocking Words?
A client sent me an email this week, stating that you could block bad reviews on social media sites by "blocking" certain words from comments such as "I", "you", "them", "they"......she heard it at a conference from some other CEO's that had some problems with bad reviews. Essentially these CEO's blocked these words making the pages read only pages so no one could leave a review on social media sites. Now, I have never heard this tactic, nor think this is a good idea in any way shape or form. And I know that you can't block bad reviews from happening (without looking at the bigger picture and encouraging some look at internal processes and customer service). Has any one heard of this tactic? Or better, know of anywhere online that documents this idea of blocking words? I have to get back to her, but I have beaten the drum about how to acquire good reviews so much, I feel I am not getting through! Help! Thanks
Reviews and Ratings | | cschwartzel0 -
Having Yelp Reviews Removed
Since we all work with Yelp on a local basis, I believe many are aware that if a review is placed by a non customer about a company, Yelp will typically remove them if you show that it isn't valid, etc. We all know they made a show of outing those who posted fake reviews as well. Here is a question I have though: Have any of you been aware of Yelp taking down valid negative reviews for companies? I have just run into this and find it somewhat perplexing. If you know of this, I would love to hear how it happens? Thanks,
Reviews and Ratings | | RobertFisher2