Compatible with the new Google update?

Good one. I’m curious too.

Yep – me as well!

The standard schema markup has not changed. The change that Google made is summarised below and will only affect users that are displaying reviews about their business on their business website:

In the past, an entity like a business or an organization could add review markup about themselves to their home page or another page and often cause a review snippet to show for that page. That markup could have been added directly by the entity or embedded through the use of a third-party widget.

We consider this “self-serving” because the entity itself has chosen to add the markup to its own pages, about its own business or organization.

Self-serving reviews are no longer displayed for businesses and organizations (the LocalBusiness and Organization schema types). For example, we will no longer display rich review snippets for how people have reviewed a business, if those reviews are considered self-serving.

Reviews are allowed and displayed for other schema types listed in the documentation. For example, a cooking site might use markup for recipes to summarize its visitor reviews. In turn, we might include this rich review markup for when those recipes appear in search.

For more information, please see: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/making-review-rich-results-more-helpful.html

Thanks. Maybe this sounds stupid, but isn’t this the way we all use the plugin? To display reviews on our website?

Thanks @geminilabs
So https://schema.org/CreativeWorkSeason for example.. Will show ratings on SERP?

@tom_jjp As shown here (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/making-review-rich-results-more-helpful.html), https://schema.org/CreativeWorkSeason will work.

However, if you choose to use a custom schema type in Site Reviews, you will need to use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that all required schema fields are included.

To add additional schema fields to a custom schema type, please see the “How do I add additional values to the schema” section on the “Site Reviews > Documentation > FAQ page”.

@geminilabs
Thank you very much for the swift reply.

@avz

Thanks. Maybe this sounds stupid, but isn’t this the way we all use the plugin? To display reviews on our website?

This does not change the way that Site Reviews works.

Site Reviews is designed to be versatile. Some people use it to collect and display reviews about their business, while others use it to add reviews for products, services, recipes, books, hotels, multiple businesses, etc.

The change is in the way that Google restricts what kind of reviews/ratings will be shown as rich snippets in search results, and it simply means that they are trying to avoid promoting reviews in search results that are written or promoted by businesses for themselves.

Thanks. We will continue to use it. But we need to figure out a way to get those stars back. But I doubt if this can be done.

@avz the policy is determined by Google. You will have the same policy applied regardless of which method you use to add reviews to your site.

I understand ??