Google welcomes reviews and ratings for a wide array of schema.org types of articles, including trade and business, products, services and different creative works such as books, arts or movies. With these reviews displayed in the search results prominently, the regular followers of a reviewer could find the reviews easily, see helpful snippets, and even could easily navigate to the website to read the full review.
Google has updated local reviews schema guidelines to make the reviews for authentic and reviews more helpful for the readers, here are the updates –
- Snippets accompanying a review should only be written by the genuine, independent and unpaid editorial reviews.
- Comments with respect to a reviews regarding the product or service of the local business should not be assessed by the organisation or edited by a content provider before submitting such comments of the customers to Google. Customers should have a freedom to express their opinions, negative or positive, without any changes by the business authority.
- Some businesses who have their branches, chains or franchises in multiple locations, try to use a common review against their businesses or products. Reviews are to be exclusively made for a particular location only. In other words, reviews for multiple-location businesses should have separate reviews for each location.
- Aggregators or content providers should not be a paid service, and they should not have any other interest, commercial agreements or financial interest in the concerned business.
- Reviews against a local business must be written in person. Use of ready-made templates and changing data contained in it will not be entertained. For example, there is a trend of using templates like “X customers have commented positively after testing the X product.”
- There is a trend of using same reviews again and again in different points of time or in different business aspects. Duplicity in this matter, in any form, will not be allowed in future.
- Local businesses should include reviews that are generated only in their own sites; including reviews from third-party sites or Only include reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews from third- party sites or syndicated reviews will not be entertained.
Undoubtedly, these updates are going to change the ways local business reviews were drawn in the past. The businesses should have clear knowledge when they can use schema markups and when they cannot use such markups.
About The Author
Mohd. Atif
I am digital marketer and blogger. Specialised in SEO, PPC and Content Marketing. Have done Google certification - Google Analytic & Google Ads. Read More
