Google Rich Snippets in E-commerce Category Pages

[s_EOgi_Bear]

Hello

Best Practice for rich snippets / structured data in ecommerce category pages?

I put structured markup in the category pages and it seems to have negatively impacted SEO.  Webmaster tools is showing about 2.5:1 products to pages ratio.

Should I be putting structured data in category Pages at all?

Thanks for your time

[MichaelC-15022]

Google considers this to be spam. Sometimes pages get away with doing this, but generally you're going to eventually get a manual action reported in Search Console.

[NlfInc]

Hey there, 2 competitors of mine show Reviews/Stars in the search results for their Product Category Pages.

Both of these brands out rank me on everything... They are both page 1.

Do you have any more information on this because I really want to do it... personally i think it makes sense to show an "Average" rating among all products of a specific category... I dont see it as spammy if its accurate/average of the products within.

I'm having a hard time finding reliable information on this.

Thank you

[s_EOgi_Bear]

OK.  Read the docs properly.  Any Ideas about Brands?

[MichaelC-15022]

I generally recommend putting basic Product markup (name, price, maybe image, URL pointing to the single product page) at that level.  The idea here is to let Google understand that that page contains a big list of products that fit the category as seen in the page title.

DO NOT put reviews at this level--I saw something from Google recently that says they consider that to be a spammy attempt to get ratings snippets in the results for that page.  Put the reviews only at the single product page level.