Can manually posted customer reviews be marked up to get stars in the search results?
Can manually posted customer reviews be marked up to get stars in the search results?
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In your SEN Masters Training Course you said that we could take reviews sent to us (via Word, email, survey or whatever other means) and add them to our pages for use in structured data.
I have a moving company client who has a formalized process for engaging clients after a service. We then add some of the customer comments to the website as testimonials.
My question - if we create a star rating within our formalized feedback and comment system, can we use this star rating along with the comments for use in structured data?
Answer: Google no longer generates rich results for Review or AggregateRating structured data markup for LocalBusiness and Organization schema, they stopped that September 2019.
The reasoning behind this is that reviews are meant to be unbiased and when a company can control the reviews about themselves then those reviews become "self serving".
In the past, an entity like a business or an organization could add review markup about themselves to their home page or another page and often cause a review snippet to show for that page. That markup could have been added directly by the entity or embedded through the use of a third-party widget.
We consider this “self-serving” because the entity itself has chosen to add the markup to its own pages, about its own business or organization.
Self-serving reviews are no longer displayed for businesses and organizations (the LocalBusiness and Organization schema types). For example, we will no longer display rich review snippets for how people have reviewed a business, if those reviews are considered self-serving.
Today, the markup that qualifies for review stars are the following:
