Blog Post
How To Get Stars Back In Organic Google Search Results For Your Business
Brent Werbeck • Sep 25, 2019
Wait!?!? Where did the stars go for the organic Google search result for my business???
Did the stars for your organic listing suddenly disappear? Don't worry, you're not alone...
First of all, don't panic if the stars for your organic search result went away all of a sudden. You're not alone and several businesses have already experienced the same. This change will become more widespread over the coming days and weeks based on updates Google has made to their algorithm.
This is a rather big update that Google just announced, so it's important that you read the following very carefully.
A little over a week ago Google announced that they are getting rid of the rich review snippet for the local business and organization schema markup. You most likely know of this as the "stars" that show up in organic search results for your business. Google made this change in an effort to improve the relevance and usefulness of reviews when they show up for a business in organic search.
Google is doing this by making an algorithmic update to the way reviews show, or don't show, in search results. Part of the reason Google is doing this is to address misleading or invalid implementations of “review widgets” or review code that businesses can place on their website to manipulate these types of search results.
Specifically, Google isn't allowing self-serving reviews
To get a little more specific here, Google defines a self-serving review as a review for a business that is placed directly on that same business's website. Usually businesses do this through the use of a third-party widget that shows all of their reviews from across the web, in some sort of filtered manner. Another common way to do this is by directly manipulating the schema mark-up of the website using the local business or organization schema markup types.
Simply put, reviews that are directly embedded on a website through a third-party widget or through the schema markup on the website will not result in “rich review snippets” (the stars in your search results) anymore.
No, you won't be penalized for using a third-party widget or having reviews on your website
Don't worry, if your business already has reviews displayed on your website, either through schema markup or a third-party widget (example of our Get More Reviews review stream widget below), Google has pretty clearly stated that you won't be penalized for this. These reviews simply won't show up in search results as Rich Snippets anymore.
Said differently, this change from Google will not have any impact on your overall organic ranking.
However, there may be an impact to the click-through rate of your organic listing if you previously had stars showing up and now they are gone. Nonetheless you still don't need to worry, since as this change gets rolled out it will be applied equally across every business, assuming Google executes this correctly.
To be a bit more specific here, Google has said that there will be no manual action taken against your website for having self-serving reviews on your website. They do however recommend that you use the best practices for structured data on your website when you do present reviews.
It is still a best practice to display reviews and testimonials on your website, so that prospective customers can see all of the positive sentiment about your business!
Furthermore, you don't need to worry about any changes to your Google My Business listing. The reviews that you gather on Google My Business will remain and you should continue to focus on getting more Google reviews on a regular basis.
Does this mean Google thinks reviews are less important?
Absolutely not.
Reviews are still as important as ever. In fact, we believe that Google reviews
are still the best place for many local businesses to generate new reviews on. The only difference now is a Google is going to stop showing the review Rich snippet and search results.
Consumer behavior hasn't changed.
The way people make buying decisions hasn't changed.
Reviews are still a major influence on how consumers make decisions mine are looking for products and services and their area.
It is still incredibly important that you prioritize review generation on all of the sites that matter most to your business. Just like we've always advised, we still believe that Google is the best place are most businesses to focus on until they start to see higher volumes of reviews.
Just because Google stopped showing your review rating within your organic listing doesn't mean you should stop displaying review on your website, your homepage, or any other page on your website. Our Get More Reviews tool can still be of great benefit to your local business for generating new reviews and easily displaying them on your website. Our Get More Reviews review stream widget
will still display your businesses reviews just as it always has.
What about other companies that say they can get stars to appear for my search results?
To put it bluntly, this isn’t possible anymore. Although this change is still being rolled out by Google, we have no reason to believe right now that certain companies will be exempt from this. In fact, Google has already given us reason to believe that this will apply across the board regardless of who you are.
Any company that is making this claim may simply not know about this new algorithm change that Google announced. It may also be the case that this change simply hasn't impacted them yet, but it is only a matter of time that it gets applied to everybody.
How to get stars back into your organic google listing
Unfortunately the old way of doing this no longer applies. The good news is that any efforts or strategies you currently have in place to generate reviews online are still valid. For example, reviews that you generate on other review sites are still eligible to show up within search results with the review Rich snippet.
As you can see in the example below, Caleesi Designs Jewelers has three different organic listings that are all showing up with the review rich snippet as a result of generating reviews on places like Yelp and Facebook. Obviously all reviews that you have on Google will still be used to populate the knowledge graph and the Google My Business search results for your listing.
Now that the review rich snippet only shows for reviews that you generated on other review sites, it's important that you continue to generate reviews on places like Google, Yelp and Facebook.
All of these changes simply mean that generating online reviews is more important than ever.
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Click the button below to contact us for information on how our GetMoreReviews
tool can help your business quickly generate more five star reviews. Getting more reviews for your business will help improve your local SEO, highlight your shining reputation to potential customer and ultimately bring new business through your doors. Call us at (888) 979-2379 or email us at help@GetMoreReviews.com
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