Self proclaimed 5 stars showing in organic search??
-
Hi there - I've just come across this site that has ratings showing in the organic listings, yet - I can't see any ratings for it online - other than a text listing on the site's own home page?
The site in question has a facebook page with no followers, and a twitter account with the same, no google plus account, no google local maps listing.
I've only ever seen "actual" google reviews and other citations being combined, averaged - then shown in search as an aggregated number.
Is it just me - or does Google accept these self rated reviews on face value??!!
See images attached...
The URL of the site is here: http://www.home-securitysystems.com.au
The search phrase they rank no.1 for is "Alarm System Melbourne" - which is pretty decent.
Any ideas?
Cheers, Dave
-
It would appear they've just added a rich snippet from schema.org to the page:
Home Solar Panels
Rated 5/5 based on 145 reviews
There's an interesting article on CTR's (related to schema markup) here: http://www.themediaflow.com/2013/05/implementing-schema-to-increase-search-traffic/
But still - I agree, false markup, false reviews = spam.
Thanks for the responses!!
-
-
Hi David,
Welcome to the grey area of SEO, according to the rules of Google you're not allowed to mark up your reviews with the proper schemas when you don't show the complete reviews about your company or service. So as long as you don't show them you can tell Google whatever kind of reviews you have since nobody is going to make sure that's really the case. So indeed Google's just accepting the reviews on faced value. They're automatically approving them since about 1,5 years and if you ask me it didn't increase the quality of the results.
In this case they marked up the text with the rich snippet data for reviews, more info could be found here. There's not much you can do about this, you could try and file a spam request but that's really a long shot.
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Showing wrong image in the SERPS
Hi Guys, In organic SERPS Google pulling incorrect product image, instead of product image its showing image from relevant products, Checked the structured data, og:image everything is set to the product image, not sure why google showing images from relevant product sidebar, any help, please?
Technical SEO | | SpartMoz0 -
How to recover search volume after domain name change?
On the 3rd of November we changed our company name and domain. The new site was not changed at all so the 301 process was quite straightforward. The change over was successful, no downtime, all pages redirected correctly (with a few minor exceptions). However, after a few days we started to see more and more links into the new site from the old site. They now stand at over 3 million. And links from the new site to the old site of over 200K. Links from the new site back to the old, were due to us having left a lot of links tucked away on various pages which were possibly causing loops with the 301 redirects on the old site. We fixed these and now there are no remaining links back to the old site, though we are still showing just over 200K links back to the old site. We are also seeing a LOT more back-links on the new site from old junk sites, which are not showing for the old site. A couple of years ago we went through about a year of trying to track down and remove thousands of spam backlinks. We did what we could, got a lot removed, showed Google the evidence, then Google lifted the penalty and said they had made some changes that meant the links were no longer causing the penalty. I added the old disavow file to the new site, but it doesn't cover a fraction of the sites which are being displayed as providing backlinks... many of which are clearly spammy. Is it possible that Google made some manual actions to lift the penalties but failed to associate these changes with the new domain? Changes that were not included in the disavow file? All help appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Exotissimo0 -
Moz showing 404 error on one of my sites
I have a problem. Everything seems to be ok, but moz shows a HTTP code of 404 for http://www.centralevapeurguide.com and I don't really know why. All my others websites return 200 but this one return 404. And obviously, only this website don't want to rank in google.. Thanks for your help. Sebastian
Technical SEO | | sebagorka0 -
How to remove my cdn sub domins on Google search result?
A few months ago I moved all my Wordpress images into a sub domain. After I purchased CDN service, I again moved that images to my root domain. I added User-agent: * Disallow: / to my CDN domain. But now, when I perform site search on the Google, I found that my CDN sub domains are indexed by the Google. I think this will make duplicate content issue. I already hit by the Panguin. How do I remove these search results on Google? Should I add my cdn domain to webmaster tools to request URL removal request? Problem is, If I use cdn.mydomain.com it shows my www.mydomain.com. My blog:- http://goo.gl/58Utt site search result:- http://goo.gl/ElNwc
Technical SEO | | Godad1 -
Need advice on search listings and link building
Search results on my keyword (engraved wedding glasses) produces several pages of linked domains. (My domain is giftthings.net) Some are good. And admittedly, some are not so good. My question then is simply, why does seomoz link analysis show such a small number of links? And the second part of my question is, "Is there some sort of "magic number", some sort of thresh hold that triggers Google's interest? With a link list that is small but growing, am I missing something in my concern that I'm not moving up in the search listings? I've written a few articles, continuing my work on link building but I remain buried in the search results.
Technical SEO | | AhmadS1 -
Search snippet ignors title tag :-(
Good Morning from 1 degrees C light drizzle Wetherby UK 😉 Ok here is todays puzzle. When I Google "Great Inns" ( http://www.greatinns.co.uk ) I get a search snippet which looks like this: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/great-inns-title-glitch.jpg As the screen grab illustrates the Title tag is missing and simply says untitled. So my questions is pleased why is google rendering this when in the source code there is a tag eg: <title>Great Inns of Britain - Home – Independent, Historic Inns, Quality Service Any insights welcome :-)</p></title>
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Google indexing thousands crazy search results with %25253
In GWT I started seeing very strange pages indexed a few weeks, and Google is no reporting over 21,000 of pages (blocked by robots.txt) with weird URLs like this: http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%2525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%2525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results The current robots.txt looks like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | BoulderJoe
Disallow: /wp-content Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /data
Disallow: /slideshows
Disallow: /page/*/?s=
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search This website is running an up to date WP install with Yoast's Google Analytics and SEO plug-in. I can't point to anything specific that happened with the site when these URLs started appearing even after I modified the robots.txt. What can be done to try and stop Google from creating and indexing these goofy URLs? I see lots of sites having this issue when I search in Google, but no one seems to have a solution.0 -
Optimising multiple pages for the same search term
We were having a discussion on title tags and optimising multiple pages for the same term. We rank well for the phrase 'chanel glasses' which points to our Chanel brand page. The Chanel brand page is optimised for this term, and has the phrase 'Chanel glasses' at the front of its title tag. Previously, the title tag on our home page had the words 'Chanel glasses' at the start in an attempt to rank twice for the term (as one of our competitors has managed). This never worked (though at the time, our DA/PA was lower than it is now). For this reason I switched the title tag on the homepage to try and rank for 'designer glasses'. My belief is, given we already rank highly for the term on a more relevant landing page, trying to rank for it again on the home page is not the best use of a title tag on our highest PA page. We may as well use it for something more generic like 'designer glasses' (though this term does not convert nearly as well, nor does it currently rank as well for us as we've not been attempting to get 'designer glasses' as anchor text. Plus it's more competitive. Another generic term maybe be preferable). My colleague's view is we should attempt to do what our competitor has done and try and rank twice on page one for this term. I like the idea of dominating the top results, but I feel that since attempting to get double-listed hasn't worked for us so far, we should use the homepage for optimising for a different term ( ideally something that we don't already rank for elsewhere on the site). I see his point of view - if we were ranking nowhere for the search term then, yes we should concentrate on getting one page to rank, not two. But since we already rank well for the term, perhaps his strategy is preferable? Just for clarity, the title tags are not duplicate, but the idea was to share many of the same keywords between the two title tags. What are your thoughts SEOmoz?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0