Last week we saw a sharp decline in the number of search results displaying the review stars rich snippets. Mozcast reported stars dropped from about 30% of search results down to 20%. However, a couple of days ago we saw those numbers start to jump up again. And now John Mueller has confirmed it was actually a bug.
Here is the Mozcast tracking for review stars.
Here is what John said in today’s webmaster office hours:
This has come up in a few instances where the review stars are shown less frequently. And we double checked that with the team on that actually, just to make sure because usually it’s kind of normal that the structured data markup, the rich snippets kind of come and go depending on changes on our side.
But they double checked and they said there was actually a bug and it should be fixed, it should be getting fixed soon, so they will show up a little more visibly now.
So good news for those who saw their CTRs drop visibly with the reduced number of review stars, although not so good for those sites without that that actually benefited from their competitors not running them.
Jennifer Slegg
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hugo says
Cool, snd what about ads? All adsense ads are missing in my AMP pages, Is that normal?
Cheers
Jennifer Slegg says
Do you mean the ads won’t render?
Myron Rosmarin says
Good news! Thanks for the update on this. Was causing some unnecessary spinning of wheels to figure out how to get the stars back. Nice to see this corrected.
Dersou C. says
Good news! Glad to see that.
Actually, I have a related question and hope you are ok that I ask it here 🙂
I see that it is possible to get the ratings snippet triggered for a categories page in addition to the products page, when viewed on the SERP. Do you know what are the specifics to consider to obtain this result? Your feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Jennifer Slegg says
There are some tips here:
http://www.thesempost.com/gary-illyes-recommendations-for-getting-featured-snippets/
And also, quality of other sites in the same search results play a role:
http://www.thesempost.com/rich-snippets-quality-other-sites-serps/
And of course, you need to make sure that your structured data markup is correct. That said, Google doesn’t want to see markup on category pages because it isn’t for a single product.
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviews
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/policies
So you can have other kinds of markup, just not ratings.
Google has been cracking down on rich snippet spam, and this is one area I know that sites are getting dinged for.