RichSnippet error for itemreviewed

Hi!
Seems like google is changing something: I will fix for the next version.

Best,
Dario

Thank you @dudo!

Great support!

My stars in Google disappeared for Blogposting by visitor votes.

Small update: the stars have been working for 2 years on my websites, now all the blogposting visitor ratings are disappearing, while settings have not been changed.

Blogposting should still work for aggregateRatings, can you share a link to the site?

https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool#url=https%3A%2F%2Fcobertec.com%2Fservicios%2Fcontrol-horario-laboral%2F

As seen in the link above (see the errors in the test tool), BlogPosting doesn’t work with Aggregate ratings anymore since Google has changed the rich snippets criteria.

Similarly CreativeWork and Article also don’t work anymore and give the same error.

This rich-snippets issue & Google change is affecting all the popular rating stars plugins – YASR, KK Star ratings, GD Rating System and Rate my Post.

As per the Google webmasters posting, ratings will be displayed only for a specific set of schemas.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/making-review-rich-results-more-helpful.html

So, for the ratings plugins to work, they will have to allow selection of specific schema types for each type of post; and allow additional information to be plugged in.

For example, in my site, I have general articles and also specific posts that are selling some courses. Visitors / Users have an option of voting on all the pages and everything was using the ‘CreativeWork’ schema.

Now, that stars will not be visible for ‘CreativeWork’, I will need to segregate all posts into ‘Article’ and ‘Course’ categories.

‘Article’ may still have the star ratings, but they will not be visible in rich snippets. Whereas the courses will need to have ‘Course’ schema. If ‘Course’ is used, Google will require additional details to be available; such as ‘Provider’, ‘Description’ etc.

So, for any star rating plugin to be useful, it should allow more post level control.

Thanks for the update, @butterfruit

I understand their point, even if in my opionion, this break the https://schema.org standard.

I hope to insert all the types they said in that article.

In the near future (maybe next update) these new types will be supported

-Book
-Game
-HowTo
-Movie
-Product

Already supported:

LocalBuisness
Recipe
Product

Best,
Dario

Thanks for the info @butterfruit, that is really helpful.
@dudo Thanks for working so hard on the plugin!
Can I replace the blogposting visitor review with product visitor review on pages where I review multiple products? Or does this only work when reviewing a single product?

I’m my case Google advise me to use the SoftwareApplication schema, so please if you could add it too I would be really grateful.

Regards.

Hmmm, so there doesn’t seem to be an option for reviews of something like Cycling Routes?

@andyt1980 Given that CreativeWork, Article, BlogPosting and even Service schema types will not show stars anymore, I am not sure if Cycling Routes can be classified among the few schema types that are on the new list.

The closest I could think of was an ‘event’ schema. If the Cycling Route can be described as an open ended event of sorts. You can probably try the event schema, immediately test the post on the Structured Data testing tool and check out what other inputs need to be specified for ‘event’.

If only Google had retained Article and/or BlogPosting, it would have made things easier.

On a lighter note, ‘Recipe’ is a schema that supports stars, so you should probably turn each Cycling Route into a recipe. i.e. Carry some raw ingredients at the beginning of the trip and make a salad or an omelette at the end of the trip ??

@dudo Your caution is absolutely valid. Adding / using incompatible or misleading schemas may result in manual penalties.

Thank you for the very helpful reply. It’s all rather disappointing, is there any way I can keep the stars but remove the structured data?.

@andyt1980 since I don’t consider myself to be an expert, I will look forward to @dudo to guide us on any possible options to retain the stars while complying with the rules.

My two cents are as below :

While the rating stars will not be displayed anymore, I would still suggest keeping the entire current schema intact. (Unless you can justify changing it to a different schema type within the rules.)

The stars are displayed only when the aggregateRating is accompanied with the other details required for a valid schema.

In other words, any schema will work fine without the stars, but the stars will work only with the supported schema types.

If aggregateRating is included in a unsupported schema type, it results in an error message and no stars, but there are no manual penalties.

The schema will still help in normal SEO to an extent and is still relevant.

After reading about this issue for a whole day, I have decided to retain the schema as is for all the pages, except a few course pages where I can justify using a ‘Course’ schema.

For the past couple of days, I am seeing a dip in traffic, so the stars (or lack thereof) does make a difference.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by butterfruit.

Thank you, I will keep the schema in place then until we have more info/hear back from @dudo. I also noticed a dip in traffic the past few days and now I know why.

@dudo Please also add schema.org/SoftwareApplication in the next update
Thanks