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.
I added a WP Customer Reviews plugin but nothing seems to appear on Google search
-
Hi,
I've added the wordpress Wp Customer Reviews plugin to a my client's website and we brought some past clients to put on reviews in order to empower the hReview factor.
Google as scraped the website several times since but we don't see any change in the organic serp.
Can you please tell me if I've done something wrong or I forgot something?
That's the website - Capital Garage Door
Thanks!
-
Hi Schlomi.
I'm Joey, one of the developers of WP Customer Reviews. I apologize for not seeing this earlier, but I'm glad I stumbled on it and very happy to help.
Your question is one we get a lot. Carson sums it up best when he says you are at Google's mercy - they decide, and it's not just about the formatting of your snippets. You can see just how "hit and miss" it is by looking at the serps when you search on "powered by wp customer reviews"
As you can see, 20-25% of the listings have star ratings in the results. I'd love to see more, but it shows what's out there. The best thing you can do to improve your chances of ratings showing up in search is to upgrade - I see you are using version 2.8, which is several versions behind. We overhauled the plugin in September, which included improvements to the rich snippets.
As an internet marketer, the intent of WP Customer Reviews was to get user generated content onto sites and have the ratings show up in SERPS. It does the job, but like always, Google decides what shows up.
Thanks for using the plugin. If you have some ideas for improvements, drop me a line.
-
Unfortunately, Google has been scaling back reviews quite a bit. We have several sites where we used to show up with star ratings on every page. Now we're lucky to get them to show up at all.
I have noticed it relies a lot on the query. If you are trying to rank for local queries where Google pulls in a local pack, for example, they're really not likely to show your stars. Maybe this is to prevent confusion. Maybe it's to help themselves on Google Maps.
Try doing a site: search with the exact URL. In my experience it's most likely to show up in low-competition searches, and nothing is less competitive than a site: search with your own site. For example https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopperapproved.com does seem to pull in stars.
The good news: what you have is working.
The bad news: you're at Google's mercy as to when your snippets will pull in. Page and domain authority (in Google's eyes) does seem to play a part, and the query will change things up. My advice is always to implement it, continue marketing, and wait for Google to realize you're really an awesome company/site with reviews worth highlighting.
Unfortunately, there's no magic number of reviews or count of links. It just depends on competition in the SERP.
-
Thanks for the answer Blakewenloe
It does have a rich snippet code that's why I'm wondering why it doesn't show anything.
Can anyone tell how much time/reviews you need until Google starts showing the ratings on serp?
-
Does the plugin include Google rich snippet code? If it's just a Wordpress review plugin without google's rich snippet code, Google isn't (as far as I know) going to display the reviews in the serp. Also, I notice that the reviews don't show the "gold stars" for the homepage (most of the time) but do for the subpages. I searched the "garage repair in victoria, va" keyword and it showed the stars from the actual google reviews.
Here's a free plugin that includes the rich snippet: https://wordpress.org/plugins/rich-reviews/
ShopperApproved has ridiculous pricing but it works well: http://www.shopperapproved.com/
There may be better options out there, but this should get your started. Good luck!
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
-
Google image search filter tabs and how to rank on them
I have noticed Google image search has included suggestion tabs (e.g,. design, nature... when searching background) on the top of the image search.
Technical SEO | | Mike555
Are there specific meta tags I can add into my images so that my images will show up on each tab?
Do those filters just show content based on image keywords or something else? IRme7gQ0 -
Reviews on Product Page or Separated
Good Afternoon We currently have our individual product information pages set-up with a link through to a separate review page optimised for the term "Product A Reviews" I was reading about structured data and if I read correctly, the reviews should sit with the marked up product data so I was wondering whether to merge them back into one page. We have many reviews so the review pages are paginated in blocks of 25 My options are: Leave as it is, product info page and separate review page Merge the review content back in to the main page and have the pagination work on that page Include the first 25 reviews on the product info page then when user clicks through to page 2, 3 etc they're taken to the separated review page. In that way the product page would regularly get new content and we can still have a page specifically targeted for reviews. From the users point of view, they probably aren't even aware they're being taken to a separate reviews page so with that in mind as I'm typing this maybe they should be one page again
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Google not pulling my favicon
Several sites use Google favicon to load favicons instead of loading it from the Website itself. Our favicon is not being pulled from our site correctly, instead it shows the default "world" image. https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=www.example.com Is the address to pull a favicon. When I post on G+ or see other sites that use that service to pull favicons ours isn't displaying, despite it shows up in Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc and we have the correct meta in all pages of our site. Any idea why is this happening? Or how to "ping" Google to update that?
Technical SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
Image search and CDNs
Hi, Our site has a very high domain strength. Although our site ranks well for general search phrases, we rank poorly for image search (even though our site has very high quality images). Our images are hosted on a separate CDN with a different domain. Although there are a number of benefits to doing this, since they are on a different domain, are we not able to capitalize on our my site's domain strength? Is there any way to associate our CDN to our main site via Google webmaster tools? Has anyone researched the search ranking impacts due to storing your images on a CDN, given that your domain strength is very high? Curious on people's thoughts?
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
UK website ranking higher in Google.com than Google.co.uk
Hi, I have a UK website which was formerly ranked 1<sup>st</sup> in Google.co.uk and .com for my keyword phrase and has recently slipped to 6<sup>th</sup> in .co.uk but is higher in position 4 in Google.com. I have conducted a little research and can’t say for certain but I wonder if it is possible that too many of my backlinks are US based and therefore Google thinks my website is also US based. Checked Google WmT and we the geo-targeted to the UK. Our server is also UK based. Does anyone have an opinion on this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tdsnet0 -
How to push down outdated images in Google image search
When you do a Google image search for one of my client's products, you see a lot of first-generation hardware (the product is now in its third generation). The client wants to know what they can do to push those images down so that current product images rise to the top. FYI: the client's own image files on their site aren't very well optimized with keywords. My thinking is to have the client optimize their own images and the ones they give to the media with relevant keywords in file names, alt text, etc. Eventually, this should help push down the outdated images is my thinking. Any other suggestions? Thanks so much.
Technical SEO | | jimmartin_zoho.com0 -
Why google index my IP URL
hi guys, a question please. if site:112.65.247.14 , you can see google index our website IP address, this could duplicate with our darwinmarketing.com content pages. i am not quite sure why google index my IP pages while index domain pages, i understand this could because of backlink, internal link and etc, but i don't see obvious issues there, also i have submit request to google team to remove ip address index, but seems no luck. Please do you have any other suggestion on this? i was trying to do change of address setting in Google Webmaster Tools, but didn't allow as it said "Restricted to root level domains only", any ideas? Thank you! boson
Technical SEO | | DarwinChinaSEO0