Google limiting Stars and Self-Serving reviews

[Tay]

Going forward Google is limiting the stars on reviews (ya'll were playing too many games), example of a feature snippet with stars:

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Specifically, we'll only display reviews with those types (and their respective subtypes):​

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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​

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Self-serving reviews aren't allowed for LocalBusiness and Organization​

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Source: Making Review Rich Results more helpful

 

[The Engineer]

This event, the Starmageddon, is a great longitudinal case study on how long it takes Google to notice a problem and finally fix it.

It was years ago when they noticed people were giving each of their posts a 5 star rating, reviewing their own posts. They said back then that stars were meant for the product, service, recipe, or whatever the topic of the post was, not the post itself. They threatened schema penalties at the time.

People got on board but kept rating the topics of their posts highly based on their own review, and Google again stepped in and said "these star ratings are meant to reflect the ratings left by commenters and reviewers on the post, not by the editorial staff themselves," if I recall correctly.

And now here we are. It makes more sense to restrict the stars to schema types, because it limits the broadness of data their schema abuse algorithm will have to deal with. I'd expect that to be the next step (in one or two years time?), actual schema penalties rolling out algorithmically.

 

[Poplanu]

"these star ratings are meant to reflect the ratings left by commenters and reviewers on the post, not by the editorial staff themselves,"

I've been planning to roll them out on my site as fake "ratings left by the community".

1. Add clickable stars rating asking "How did you like this article 1-5".
2. Populate the data in the back-end to add (1) 40-120 votes and (2) average rating of 4.6-4.9. to each article from the get-go.
3. Treat any further votes normally

This way I have ratings left by the readers, but I don't have to rely on people actually clicking the stars to have a nice 5-star rating next to my article.

 

[Sutra]

I've been planning to roll them out on my site as fake "ratings left by the community".

1. Add clickable stars rating asking "How did you like this article 1-5".
2. Populate the data in the back-end to add (1) 40-120 votes and (2) average rating of 4.6-4.9. to each article from the get-go.
3. Treat any further votes normally

This way I have ratings left by the readers, but I don't have to rely on people actually clicking the stars to have a nice 5-star rating next to my article.

This is what I did on a bunch of articles. Works great. If you're gonna do it stay away from the Rich Reviews plugin. It's fucked right now due to injected malware. The authors say they will patch it soon but as of now, it's still vulnerable.

 

[Poplanu]

This is what I did on a bunch of articles. Works great.

How did you do it technically? Plugin for stars + advanced custom fields for schema? Or injecting schema from Google Tag Manager? Or do you use something like SEOPress?

I've never done something like this before, and these are the options I'm exploring. Have Yoast right now doing the schema stuff, but it seems that they're limited when it comes to star ratings.

I've used the "KKR Stars" plugin in the past, but it kept breaking the design of the site with WordPress updates so I ditched it. I'd love to add a snippet of javascript code for the stars manually, but damn that's gonna take some time since I'm not a developer.

It's fucked right now due to injected malware.

Injected malware what the hell, thanks for the heads up.

 

[Sutra]

@Poplanu I looked through a bunch of plugins and Rich Reviews was the only I found that would allow me to manually create insert my own review + manually select the star rating + insert it with whatever date I wanted (important since I wanted to backdate some of the reviews so it looked like the first started coming in after posted the article years back) + on top of that allow actual users to leave comments (which was good just in case someone left a good rating).

The plugin included the necessary schema so it was just a matter of selecting some of the settings. Then creating a spreadsheet with the necessary fields and data, including the post ID so it knew which articles to create the reviews for. I created the template then outsourced the writing of several hundred reviews and told them exactly how many 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 star reviews to create (this was because I calculated, ahead of time, exactly how many were needed to get say a 4.6 star average). From there I imported a portion of the spreadsheet into Wordpress (left about 2 years worth extra so I could import 2-3 new reviews a month so it looked legit + would add more info to the article thus I could legit use the "updated xx/xx/xxxx" thing to get the freshness bump in the serps). Then just needed to place the shortcode(s) into the proper places on the article, and voila, got reviews, a place for users to add their own reviews, and the star schema showing in the serp result.

You don't need to use the shortcodes, I don't think, but I did because I wanted to place them in very specific spots.

Regarding the malware, the plugin recently got hacked and tons of people using it, including myself, got their site fucked with malware. Luckily, I was able to catch it immediately and get it resolved. But pretty much lost a day of work because of it. hah.