Making Review Rich Results more helpful

Monday, September 16, 2019

Search results that are enhanced by review rich results can be extremely helpful when searching
for products or services (the scores and/or “stars” you sometimes see alongside search results).

To make them more helpful and meaningful, we are now introducing algorithmic updates to reviews in
rich results. This also addresses some of the invalid or misleading implementations site owners
have flagged to us.

Focus on schema types that lend themselves to reviews

While, technically, you can attach review markup to any schema type, for many types displaying
star reviews does not add much value for the user. With this change, we’re limiting the pool of
schema types that can potentially trigger review rich results in search. Specifically, we’ll
only display reviews with those types (and their respective subtypes):

• 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 aren’t allowed for LocalBusiness and Organization

Reviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” aren’t in the best interest of users. 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 third-party widget. That’s why, with this
change, we’re not going to display review rich results anymore for the schema types
LocalBusiness and
Organization (and
their subtypes) in cases when the
entity being reviewed controls the reviews themselves.

Updated on September 18, 2019:

To explain more, 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.

Reviews are allowed and displayed for other schema types listed in the
documentation. For example, a
cooking site might use markup for recipes to summarize its visitor reviews. In turn, we might
include this rich review markup for when those recipes appear in search.

FAQ

Add the name of the item that’s being reviewed

With this update, the name property is now required, so you’ll want
to make sure that you specify the name of the item that’s being
reviewed.

This update will help deliver a much more meaningful review experience for users, while requiring
little to no changes on the part of most site owners. You can find all those updates documented in
our developer documentation. If
you have any questions, you can come to our
webmaster forums!

Posted by Yuxin Cao, Software Engineer and Sven Naumann, Trust and Safety Search