On Monday, Google announced an update for Reviews Rich Results. Google’s main aim is to enhance the Reviews Rich Results for users and ‘’address’’ abusive execution and enforce limits to where rich results start. Moreover, the ‘’name’’ property becomes essential.
Reviews Rich Results
The reviews rich results are clearly described in Google’s Review Snippet developer page. Google takes your schema structured data related to reviews and displays stars in the search results.
The rich snippets developer page states:
‘’Review snippets may appear in rich results or Google Knowledge Panels.’’ It’s the recommendations on their appearance in rich results which has been affected.
Limits Imposed on When Rich Results Reviews Are Shown
Google has declared that there will be a limited display of rich results reviews. Any review outside the limits won’t show review snippets. The allowed schema types are mentioned below-
- 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
Self-serving Reviews Are Disallowed
Self-serving reviews are reviews that you post for yourself. Google won’t display self-serving reviews in the featured snippets from now on. They stated-
“We call reviews “self-serving” when a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A – either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget. “
‘’name’’ Property Is Now Essential
Arguably the most significant change to Reviews Rich Results is the mandatory requirement of the name property in the featured snippets. Publishers who are not dependent on schema structured data plugins, including Reviews WordPress Plugins, should check whether their plugin includes the ‘’name’’ property.
In case the name property isn’t included with your plugin then look for an update related to your plugin and update it. If there is no ‘’name’’ update, then it can be something which your plugin maker is going to include in a future update. You may want to get in touch with your plugin maker to know when this is coming since the ‘’name’’ property is essential now.
