Google Announces Changes To Their Schema Rich Snippets Review Markup
Recently, Google made an announcement that there would be significant changes coming in the manner in which review rich results display. You may already be familiar with the star ratings and how they will appear within the organic search results that come up for pages that have Schema markups. These major changes coming out will impact the rich snippet star ratings that you will see in both Organization and Local Business Schema types.
No longer are you going to see these ratings stars come up when the business or entity has a Structured Data markup that is embedded on the website. This is the case whether it has been embedded through a third-party widget or done manually.
The information Google put out states that they are limiting the schema type pool that may trigger review rich results that come up in search. To be more specific, these changes mean that they will only be displaying reviews of those types as well as their respective subtypes. These include:
- 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
Such change seems to be explicitly aimed at websites that are trying to manipulate review Schema as a way to show rating stars with organic search results. This can also impact any third-party widgets that have embedded review markups. Until this point, they have been giving rating stars in the organic search results.
Because this is a process still rolling out as of the end of September 2019, you may even see review rating stars popping up on various sites that either use the third-party widgets or manual embedding.
It is important to note that Google did say that any third-party websites that work to collect reviews independently would not be affected by this change. What this means is that websites such as Facebook, Yelp, HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List, and others are still able to display star ratings when coming up in the search results. It would only be sites deemed as self-serving that would see the changes. If you have a traditional Google My Business listing, the changes will not impact you.
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