Google Updates Review Schema Guidelines
A set of new review guidelines was released alongside Google’s new Critic Review Snippet Extension. Some of the guideline changes are considerably different from the previous rules and even contradictory because practices like marking up reviews from third parties is now prohibited while allowing customers to post both good and bad reviews is now required. What does that mean? Well, it means that this update is one you're going to want to read so that you are NOT working with outdated facts.
Here's a quick look at the new Google rich snippet review guidelines:
Snippets must not be written or provided by the business or content provider unless they are genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews.
Reviews must allow for customers to express both positive and negative sentiments. They may not be vetted by the business or restricted by the content provider based on the positive/negative sentiment of the review before submission to Google.
Reviews cannot be template sentences built from data or automated metrics. For example, the following is not acceptable: "Based on X number of responses, on average people experienced X with this business."
Reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other words, critic reviews for multiple-location businesses cannot be syndicated or applied to all business locations of the same company.
There can't be any commercial agreements (paid or otherwise) to provide reviews between the content provider and the reviewed business.
Do not include reviews that are duplicate or similar across many businesses.
Only include reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews from third-party sites or syndicated reviews.
The hope is that these new rules will help tighten-up the legitimacy of reviews and establish greater trust in the search engines. Time will tell if it works or not. Until then, be sure that you're following the guidelines above so that when action is taken you're standing on the right side of ...
