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
-
I'm wondering if reviews services like yotpo and reviews.io are worth it.
The reviews services advertise that your reviews and stars will be placed in your Google search results and this helps with rankings. Does anyone have experience using Yotpo or Reviews.io with a brick and mortar business? Or, any business for that matter? Thanks,
Reviews and Ratings | | Jarod45660 -
Any experiences with Reviews.io?
Hello, We have used Trustpilot.com for a few years in the past. Service was reasonable and they did what they were supposed to do. However, due to their price and requirement for a full-year payment upfront we stopped using their review collection service. Is someone using Reviews.io? They are included in Google Review Partners, which seems to be very encouraging:
Reviews and Ratings | | the-global-communicator
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375474?hl=en Also, they have a decent price for their intermediary package (about $ 89/month) and don't require a yearly contract like Trustpilot and some others. Any experiences you could share about Reviews.io will be appreciated. Luciano, The Translation Company Group0 -
3rd Party Approved Reviews - Widget or API Feed - Any thoughts ?
Hi Mozzers, We use a google approved 3rd party review company to collect reviews for our branches and now also for our products( this is about to be implemented). We currently use one of their widgets on our site (its javascript) to show the reviews. I don't think google can read this and I don't think we currently, therefore, get any direct seo benefit from it. My questions are as follows : I obviously want to get any SEO benefit from any review text which customers leave but as the data itself is housed on the review site with a widget on my site pointing to it,should I use an API feed as opposed to a widget. If google can read the review text on my page - then surely i should some benefit from it even though, it could technically be classed as duplicate content what are peoples thoughts ? . thanks Pete
Reviews and Ratings | | PeterCol120 -
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 -
Paying for Reviews Penalty?
Hello, recently came across a company that has been paying people directly for reviews. I of course do not recommend this and realized the ethical implications and even the lawsuits that can come from this, but does Google have a manual penalty for fake reviews or do they just algorithmically discount ones that raise red flags? I have never really had to worry about this in the past. I know you can flag fake reviews to them on an individual basis, but does anyone have history of knowing specific situations where a company was manually punished for doing this? Just curious and I kind of wanted to give them strong documentation to knock it off. Thanks in advance.
Reviews and Ratings | | jeremyskillings0 -
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 -
Do schema review numbers have to be manually updated?
Hi! I've had success with review schema rendering in SERPs but have had to manually code the numbers and update those numbers as more reviews come in (which is a bit time-consuming). Is there a way to use auto-generated numbers that will still render schema or do those numbers have to be manually added? I've looked at the schema for sites like IMDB, and their schema numbers seem to be manually added, which seems like a huge lift. Advice/input is appreciated!
Reviews and Ratings | | 199580 -
Yelp Review From My Customer Removed
Hi, A customer of mine told me she created a yelp account just to give me a review. She's a good customer and wanted to show me her appreciation. I thanked her for taking the trouble. About a week later, I see that her review was marked as "not recommended." This was a legitimate review made by a real customer. I'm angry that it was removed for no reason. I noticed a competitor of mine has 18 yelp reviews and all of them show up just fine. I also noticed that this same competitor is paying for ads from Yelp. A couple of years ago, another customer reviewed me on yelp and it was also labeled as "not recommended." So I now have 2 "not recommended" reviews on Yelp that, if you ask me, imply that my reviews are fake. After Yelp and Yahoo merged, I lost the 14 Yahoo reviews I had obtained from customers over the last six years. I have also noticed over the years, that whenever I need to sign into my Yelp business account to update the data, it's locked until some pushy sales person calls and asks to speak to me in order to try to sell me ads on Yelp. Anyone else hate Yelp? They're obviously not really interested in making sure reviews are "real," they're just interested in selling expensive ads.
Reviews and Ratings | | Ophelia6191