Self proclaimed 5 stars showing in organic search??
-
Hi there - I've just come across this site that has ratings showing in the organic listings, yet - I can't see any ratings for it online - other than a text listing on the site's own home page?
The site in question has a facebook page with no followers, and a twitter account with the same, no google plus account, no google local maps listing.
I've only ever seen "actual" google reviews and other citations being combined, averaged - then shown in search as an aggregated number.
Is it just me - or does Google accept these self rated reviews on face value??!!
See images attached...
The URL of the site is here: http://www.home-securitysystems.com.au
The search phrase they rank no.1 for is "Alarm System Melbourne" - which is pretty decent.
Any ideas?
Cheers, Dave
-
It would appear they've just added a rich snippet from schema.org to the page:
Home Solar Panels
Rated 5/5 based on 145 reviews
There's an interesting article on CTR's (related to schema markup) here: http://www.themediaflow.com/2013/05/implementing-schema-to-increase-search-traffic/
But still - I agree, false markup, false reviews = spam.
Thanks for the responses!!
-
-
Hi David,
Welcome to the grey area of SEO, according to the rules of Google you're not allowed to mark up your reviews with the proper schemas when you don't show the complete reviews about your company or service. So as long as you don't show them you can tell Google whatever kind of reviews you have since nobody is going to make sure that's really the case. So indeed Google's just accepting the reviews on faced value. They're automatically approving them since about 1,5 years and if you ask me it didn't increase the quality of the results.
In this case they marked up the text with the rich snippet data for reviews, more info could be found here. There's not much you can do about this, you could try and file a spam request but that's really a long shot.
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Many errors in Search Console (strange parameters)
Hello, I have many strange parameters in my search console that make many 404 pages, for example: mywebsite.com/article-name/&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjk4YjY4ZDExNTYxOTgzZTk6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AFQjCNFvpYpYpYf9DoyRBBu8jbiQB8JcIQ mywebsite.com/article-name/&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwj1zMLR0JbLAhUGM5oKHejjBJAQqQIILSgAMAk&usg=AFQjCNEBNFx3dG5B0-16X6eXTS7k-Srm6Q Can someone tell me how to solve it?
Technical SEO | | JohnPalmer0 -
Some Old date showing in SERP
I see some old date Jan 21 2013 showing up for some categories in Google search results. These are category pages and I do not see the date in view source. This is not a wordpress site or a blog page. We keep changing this page by removing/adding items so it is not outdated.
Technical SEO | | rbai0 -
Parked domain is first in search results
We have several brand related domains which are parked and pointing to our main website. Some of these websites are redirecting using a 302 (don't ask, that's a whole other story), but these are being changed. But it shouldn't matter what type of redirect they are no? Since there has never been any traffic and they are not indexed? But it seems that one of them was indexed: exotravel.vn. A search for our brand name or the previous brand name (exotravel and exotissimo) brings up this parked domain first! How can that be? The domain has never been used and has no backlinks. exotravel.vn is redirecting and I submitted a change of address weeks ago to Google, but its still coming up first in all brand name searches for exotissimo or exotravel.
Technical SEO | | Exotissimo0 -
Screaming Frog Content Showing charset=UTF-8
I am running a site through Screaming Frog and many of the pages under "Content" are reading text/html; charset=UTF-8. Does this harm ones SEO and what does this really mean? I'm running his site along with this competitors and the competitors seems very clean with content pages reading text/html. What does one do to change this if it is a negative thing? Thank you
Technical SEO | | seoessentials0 -
Local Search: Technically optimised for Reviews & Stars, but not showing in SERPS
Hi, for over a year now we actively use schema.org into our yellow pages platform.
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories
Simultaneaously we managed to set up a review platform to attract more users to write reviews. We also monitor closely local search experts like (blumenthal and co 😉 ). So I learned in this post http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/07/19/how-many-reviews-to-get-the-star-treatment-somewhere-between-4-and-5/ that it takes you 4-5 reviews to get the star treatment by Google. But at this moment, I cannot find any star treatment. For example on this listing http://www.goudengids.be/hollywok-kortrijk-kortrijk-8500/1/ you can notice the presence of 6 review (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goudengids.be%2Fhollywok-kortrijk-kortrijk-8500%2F1%2F) but in Google itself it is not displayed as such. So my question is: in your experience, are there any other parameters that will trigger the stars to appear?0 -
Bing search results
Hi I am getting little or no traffic via Bing. Why would this be? all my traffic is from Google and social media. my site is www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Warnings on Pages excluded from Search Engines
I am new to this, so my question may seem a little rookie type... When looking at my crawl diagnostic errors there are 1604 warnings for "302 redirects". Of those 1604 warnings 1500 of them are for the same page with different product ID's on them such as: www.soccerstop.com/EMailproduct.aspx?productid=999
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
www.soccerstop.com/EMailproduct.aspx?productid=998 In our robots.txt file we have Disallow: /emailproduct.aspx Wouldn't that take care of this problem? If so, why is it still giving me these warning errors? It does take into account our robots.txt file when generating this report does it not? Thanks for any help you can provide.
James0