Google Looking Into Review Stars Dropping Out Of The Search Results

Last week, there were webmasters who began noticing huge drops in reviews and review stars showing up in the Google search results.  To further validate these drop in numbers, there was a Mozcast SERP Feature Graph that shows  a sharp decline in these reviews and review stars.  These reviews and review stars went from showing up in about 35 percent of the queries to only 22 percent of the queries in just a couple days.

Here’s the Moz graph:

When Search Engine Land asked Google about this last week, Google said that they were currently “looking into it and will let you know when we have more details.”

So is Google intentionally removing these star reviews from their search results?  Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t  But, it seems that a huge percentage of the queries that Moz has been tracking shows there is a significant decline in review snippets.  With this information, this could mean that it’s merely a bug.  Either way, hopefully a statement will come out of Google soon to let us know what is going on.

Source – Barry Schwartz