Google has announced that it has applied an “algorithmic updates to reviews in rich results,” in order to determine if Google should show the reviews (the stars) in the search results snippets. Google said this will “ease implementation” for this going forward.
This means that Google is showing review rich result for only:
- A Clear set of schema types for review snippets
- Non “self-serving” reviews
- Reviews that have the name property within the markup
The following is a list of the schema types that are currently allowed to show review rich results in Google search results:
- 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
According to Google, in addition to the above, self-serving reviews aren’t allowed. “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,” Google wrote.
Google said that when you review something, you need to add the property to the markup for it to qualify for this review markup. “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 added.
The following is a screen shot of a sample snippet in the Google search results that have reviews within the results. These starts are the review rich results:
Google has updated the review snippet developer documents to clarify these changes going forward.