What is a Review Schema?

Getting noticed on Google is the holy grail of digital marketing and, consequently, website owners will do everything in their power to stand out on users’ search results. Tactical keywords, clever taglines and special deals are all standard practices for enhancing the visibility of a web address, helping to drive traffic and increase sales of a good or service.

One relatively less well-known, yet highly effective, method of grabbing attention, however, is through the introduction of rich review snippets to a website’s HTML. Using code from a review markup implementation system, websites are able to display customer review ratings on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). If a company has received a five-star rating from a customer review online, for example, then five stars will appear between the website’s URL and the description when it appears on Google’s SERPs.

Schema.org

Schema.org (often called Schema) is a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to achieve a rich review snippet. It is the result of a collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! to help provide the information their search engines need to understand a website’s content and provide the best search results possible at that time.

With the acknowledgement of customer reviews as an increasingly significant aspect of a company’s image, showcasing a review snippet is interpreted by SEO experts as a decisively significant move for website owners. Statistics show that a review schema can increase click-through rates – defined as the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the total number of users who view a page, and commonly used as a measure of success for different marketing strategies – by as much as 63 percent, making it one of the most coveted rich results sought out by SEOs.

Violation of service

However, since their launch, review schemas have been systematically abused by various companies looking to get their website noticed by displaying lots of strong reviews under their URL. Webmasters in the past have attempted to gain the rich result by implementing deceptive structured data on their web pages, leading to the exhibition of artificial ratings on every page of their site.

One of the ways of doing this was by taking reviews that had not been submitted by a third-party and therefore could not have been considered genuine, independent and unpaid. Another tactic was to vet the reviews by only selecting positive ratings and ignoring anything negative, creating a biased representation of the company.

In 2017, Google updated their guidelines to crack down on this particular form of malpractice by issuing manual actions that address attempts to manipulate their search index, usually in the form of a lower-ranking or removal of the URL from their search engine until the problem has been rectified.

Latest guidelines

Google is clear about what violates their guidelines, and state the following with regards to review schema:

• Ensure an aggregate evaluation of an item by many people with org/AggregateRating is marked up. The search engine might show total ratings as rich snippets. In some forms of items, these will appear as answers in SERPs
• Make an apparent reference to a specific good or service by placing the review within the markup of another org url, for example, schema.org/Book or schema.org/LocalBusiness. An alternative is to use a schema.org URL as a value for the itemReviewed property.
• Ensure that the reviews that are marked up are easily accessible to users from the marked-up page. Users should be clearly aware that the page has review content
• Offer review information about particular items, rather than about categories or lists of items
  Do: The White Horse
  Don’t: Best pubs in London
• Guidelines for local businesses vary slightly to normal guidelines, and include the following:
  • Reviews must be taken from users directly
  • Do not depend on human editors to create, curate, or compile rating information for local businesses; Use critic review structured data rather than depending on humans to create, curate or collect rating information

That being said, there is still some general confusion when it comes to following Google’s guidelines on this topic, including some search categories applying ratings to their results, which have either managed to find a loophole in the system or Google have chosen to look the other way.

Conclusion

A review schema is an effective tool for marketers to improve a company’s ranking within search engines and draw users’ attention to their service, however, in most cases, guidelines must be strictly adhered to.