Schema and the abuse of it

[Bio-RadAbs]

Hey guys,

Looking at schema, especially the aggregate rating, It's easy for anything to just put up a rating and slap on the code to their page.

But wouldn't this open up abuse of schema? Are there any mechanisms search engines have put in place to de-rank such practices? I just see schema trusting users to do the morally right thing rather than a mechanism to capture/punish bad practices

Thoughts?

[seolearner007]

I am New Member and also new in SEO world.Last day i read an post on SEOMOZ in this sector.he suggest to use

http://schema.org

Explain please

[TomRayner]

I'd invite you to search for "car insurance" on Google UK - you can see an example of this abuse already being used. Aviva pretty recently tried to legitimise its star rating that shows up in search, but its reviews are still internal, so not really legitimate.  Here's another good blog post that covers how easy it is to snippet abuse.

Now snippets don't effect your ranking, but they do obviously effect CTR.  Google does have a method in place to take action on snippet spam - they have and will take action.  I think you can be safe in assuming that they'd be looking to catch this on a greater scale should it ever occur.

In short, it aint big and it aint clever.