Google review rich snippets

Meta Community
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Just thought I’d mention this for those that aren’t up to speed with Google’s latest move to conquer the world. They recently announced a change to review rich results which has caused no end of confusion.

Apparently, you are now no longer allowed to embed what they refer to as “self-serving” reviews for schema types LocalBusiness and Organization on your website.

According to G, “self-serving” reviews are reviews about “entity A” that are placed on the website of “entity A”. So, any marked up reviews about you on your site are a definite no-no.

Read the full garbled announcement here: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Making Review Rich Results more helpful

Even reviews that are on Google itself aren’t immune. You can’t even use Google’s own API to embed Google reviews about your business on your own website. Well, you can, but then G will ignore all reviews and in certain cases, you could end up with a penalty.

Go figure…

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Confusion seems to abound here… this article seems to be the best I’ve seen so far for further explanation: Distilled – Now Brainlabs

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Yes, that’s a good article. But it still seems to be a guessing game. Google’s ability to articulate changes such as this is remarkably poor. Maybe deliberately so. Anything is possible where G is concerned.

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I think Google purposefully keep everything vague as they are afraid of people trying to ‘game’ their system.

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Yes, I’m sure you’re right @klein

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