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Review snippets disappeared

PanosG

PanosG

New Member
Hi guys - we host an industry business directory on our site where people can leave reviews for different vendors. We use the reviews schema inside an organisation schema for the vendor business being reviewed.

As of the September Google update on review snippets, our review snippets have disappeared from SERPs. Our markup is still valid, and the reviews shouldn't be self-serving (the organisation within which the reviews sit is not our website). Any idea what we're doing wrong?

Here's one such vendor review page: racedirectorshq.com/online-registration/imathlete/
 
Community

Community

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PanosG

PanosG

New Member
Thanks for the reply, "Community" :)

I have read everything there is to read online on this. Can't work out what the issue is though.

My best guesses so far of what might be going wrong are:

1) Using JSON-LD instead of Microdata. Some people suggest that JSON-LD is easier to game than Microdata. And from a few examples I saw, this hypothesis seems to stand up.

2) Not offering a clear "add review" link on the page (?) The add review link is only visible once members log in.
 
Community

Community

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JSON-LD is fine, actually much more flexible in my opinion.

Looks like the stars have been removed from every major directory I've just looked at, notiably only facebook business pages are showing stars ( on some businesses ) which have been crawled since the September update .
 
PanosG

PanosG

New Member
Interestingly, I've compared a couple of pairs of sites with similar listings, one site using JSON-LD, another Microdata. And the Microdata sites have both kept their snippets, whereas the JSON-LD have dropped them.

Obviously, it's difficult to tell from such a small sample, but if the idea is to fight spammy reviews, it makes sense to favour Microdata, given that the content is tagged inline. With JSON-LD you could, in principle, inject any kind of markup with no/loose correspondence to actual content.
 
Community

Community

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Have you made sure in Google cache that the pages which are using the inline microdata have been re-cached since September 16th ?

The ones I've found so far which still have star ratings just havent been recrawlled since the update, so will likely get removed next time they are crawlled.

Edit, Just found one which is using inline Schema, was crawled this month ( october ) and is still displaying the stars :

https://search.google.com/structure...w.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/valspar.html

You could be right, maybe do a test on one page of your site, adding inline microdata, requesting a recrawl and seeing if the stars appear. Should be able to see the results within hours.
 
PanosG

PanosG

New Member
Ok, got some encouraging results.

I swapped the markup from JSON-LD to Microdata across all listings on our directory and got a few of them re-crawled. Review snippets are starting to re-appear on some (hopefully all soon).
 
W

wixexperts

New Member
I will try also for my 1 client that belongs with dental implants category, I have also faced such problem in his website. will use it.
 
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