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
-
Organic search traffic has dropped by 35% since 18 September, we don't know why.
Organic traffic to our website has dropped 35% since 18 September 2017 to date. From 1 January to 18 September 2017 organic traffic was up by just under 1% over all (Google up by 1.32%). Paid search traffic over the same time has remained steady. There is nothing we can think of that we've done that has caused the drop. We had an issue with Google page speed test failing when running a test but we resolved this issue on 20 November and in that time we've seen an even greater drop (44% in the last week). The drop is seen across the 3 main search engines, not just Google, which points toward something we've done, but as mentioned, we can't think of any significant change we made in September that would have such negative effects. There is little difference across devices. Is anyone aware of a significant event in September in the search engine world that may have influenced our organic traffic? Any help gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | imaterus0 -
Robots.txt Disallow: / in Search Console
Two days ago I found out through search console that my website's Robots.txt has changed to User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RAN_SEO
Disallow: / When I check the robots.txt in the website it looks fine - I see its blocked just in search console( in the robots.txt tester). when I try to do fetch as google to the homepage I see its blocked. Any ideas why would robots.txt block my website? it was fine until the weekend. before that, in the last 3 months I saw I had blocked resources in the website and I brought back pages with fetch as google. Any ideas?0 -
Schema showing up in product listing?
I have added schema to my product page as follows: Example product description ..... and so forth. However, the schema is showing up on the product page itself. How do I keep the schema on the SERP page, but not on the product page? My client doesn't want it to affect the site design. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DWallace0 -
Why is Google showing sitelinks for 1 of our keywords, but not the other which is very similar?
For the term "Corazonas Foods" Google displays the sitelinks in the SERP listing. But for the term "Corazonas" it does not. The second term, Corazonas (our brand name), is not a generic term for anything so why wouldn't Google do the same for both terms?
Technical SEO | | getwilder20 -
Domains redirect influence search rankings
Hi seomoz, I'm currently optimizing a website which is www.photobookworldwide.com and the ranking is on 2nd page, but looking at the result this morning, instead of showing photobookworldwide.com, it show other result which is www.photobooklaos.com on 2nd page for the keyword photobooks. Our web developer using virtual domain, and redirected photobooklaos.com to photobookworldwide.com. Any solution for this? need you guys to help me on this. Cheers Gerald
Technical SEO | | greathokage0 -
Are building a page using HTML 5 better for seo?
Very general question really, but does anyone know whether Google sees html5 pages as being superior in any way to xhtml or html 4.x pages?
Technical SEO | | jimpannell0 -
Pagination and SEO: How do I fix it during search parameters?
Today, I have watched very interesting video on YouTube about Pagination and SEO. I have implemented pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev" on my paginated page. You can get more idea by visit following pages. www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?p=2 www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?p=3 I have added NOINDEX FOLLOW attribute to page 2, page 3 and so on. There is simple question from my side. Can I remove NOINDEX FOLLOW attribute from paginated page or not? I have big confusion & issues when paginated URLs contain search parameters. You can get more idea by visiting following URLs. http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?dir=asc&order=name&p=2 http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?dir=asc&order=name&p=3 What is best suggestion for this kind of pages?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
How to recover after blocking all the search engine spiders?
I have the following problem - one of my clients (a Danish home improvement company) decided to block all the international traffic (leaving only Scandiavian one), because they were getting a lot of spammers using their mail form to send e-mails. As you can guess this lead to blocking Google also since the servers of Google Denmark are located in the US. This lead to drop in their rankings. So my question is - What Shall I do now - wait or contact Google? Any help will be appreciated, because to be honest I had never see such thing in action until now 😄 Best Regards
Technical SEO | | GroupM0