Google has updated its rules for how and when it shows the reviews rich results, the review stars, in the Google search results. In short, the new rules are there is now a defined set of schema types for review snippets, self-serving reviews aren't allowed and name of the thing you are reviewing is required.
Supported Schema Types
Here are the specific defined sets of schema types that support review snippets:
- schema.org/Book
- schema.org/Course
- schema.org/CreativeWorkSeason
- schema.org/CreativeWorkSeries
- schema.org/Episode
- schema.org/Event
- schema.org/Game
- schema.org/HowTo
- schema.org/LocalBusiness
- schema.org/MediaObject
- schema.org/Movie
- schema.org/MusicPlaylist
- schema.org/MusicRecording
- schema.org/Organization
- schema.org/Product
- schema.org/Recipe
- schema.org/SoftwareApplication
Self-Serving reviews
There is a lot of confusion around this, Google wrote "Reviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” aren't in the best interest of users. We call reviews “self-serving” when a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A - either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget. That’s why, with this change, we’re not going to display review rich results anymore for the schema types LocalBusiness and Organization (and their subtypes) in cases when the entity being reviewed controls the reviews themselves."
Here are some of the Q&As from Google after posting this:
I double-checked to make sure :) -- that's incorrect. Regardless of how the reviews are embedded on your site (widget or not), if it's for your own LocalBusiness/Organization, they would be considered self-serving and not be shown.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 17, 2019
A good way to think about this is that even if you can't directly control how the reviews are collected (which can't be confirmed externally), you can choose which widget to embed.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 17, 2019
That's correct. If you embed a widget with reviews about your site (LocalBusiness/Organization & sub-types), on your site, we won't show those as "stars" in search. If the reviews are elsewhere, then we would show those there.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 17, 2019
As an FYI, a year ago this was okay but things change.
@JohnMu might be able to say better but I think the post is clear that if a website ultimately controls the reviews about itself, we won't display those whether it's through direct markup or a third-party widget.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 16, 2019
Again, @JohnMu might be able to say better. But the key part is "when the entity being reviewed controls the reviews themselves." If you exert *control* over the review system, that's where the self-serving provision comes in.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 16, 2019
If it was a widget like "put this on your site; get reviews from only your visitors; you can delete and manage as you want," that's probably going to be self-serving. If it's "this widget shows reviews from across the web; you can't delete or manage," then probably not.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 16, 2019
It's specific to reviews about your business, we tweaked the text in the blog post to make it a bit clearer: "Self-serving reviews aren't allowed for LocalBusiness and Organization" (reviews for, say, products you sell are fine)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) September 16, 2019
Property name required
Finally, you must have the name of the item that's being reviewed. Google said "with this update, the name property is now required, so you'll want to make sure that you specify the name of the item that's being reviewed." Google updated the developer docs to make that name property required.
Forum discussion at Twitter and Local Search Forums.
Update: Google has had a lot of questions around this change and posted an FAQ. Here is the tweet with the details:
After receiving your feedback, we updated the blog post with some clarifications and answers to frequently asked questions: https://t.co/NwZ4unzoOF pic.twitter.com/TkQP2lr3jk
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) September 18, 2019
