What is the relationship between the star rating and the review score?

Hello again,

You can create a 5 star rating if you want to use “stars” as your rating mechanism.

Or if you prefer, you can use a criteria-based rating system, where a books rating is based off things such as plot, world, story, characters. This criteria-based is also based on 1 to 5 scale.

If you have both ratings for a book, the star rating is what is shown to Google in the JSON-LD schema data.

But the 5 star rating is ALWAYS there. So if I ignore it in favour of the criteria system, then the ratings will show up on Google as 0.

Mind you, I can’t see where the 5 star rating appears. Or it seems like it appears on the book image in the review page, but it only shows one star, even though the stars are set to be 5.

You can see that here:

https://sffanz.nz/review/ancestral-machines/

You can also see that if I set the criteria of the Rating to stars, then the stars flow over the text beside it. And the text beside it is also the start of the review. Since the rating is at the bottom of the review anyway, having the text is not useful…

Thanks

For this example review, Google sees the rating as “2.7 out of 5”. I just remembered that I had changed it a while ago, at a users request. So if both system are used, it prefers the review criteria rating, I stand corrected.

For the issues with the size of the stars, I’ll provide with the CSS code to fix it tomorrow.

It is 11:40 PM my time, I have to go now.

For the review criteria stars, you can adjust there size with the below CSS code.

#rcno-review-score-box .review-summary .overall-score .overall, .rcno-review-badge .score {
    font-size: 30px;
}

#rcno-review-score-box .review-summary .overall-score .overall-text {
    background: #3e3e3e !important;
}

As for the 5 star review stars, there is something odd about your theme that is affecting the size of those stars. I’ll have to take a closer look to resolve that issue.

Hi ya,
Yes the theme is definitely doing some odd formatting.

Thanks for the CSS!

Did you apply the CSS to your site? I ask because the review criteria star looks the same.

Ah yes. I’ve now added it, and it works much better.

Thanks