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 Search Console Showing 404 errors for product pages not in sitemap?
We have some products with url changes over the past several months. Google is showing these as having 404 errors even though they are not in sitemap (sitemap shows the correct NEW url). Is this expected? Will these errors eventually go away/stop being monitored by Google?
Technical SEO | | woshea0 -
SERP Title shows up-with-dashes
Occasionally I see the our 'listings' on Google where the Title line shows up with dashes... like sony-professional-hard-drive - TapeandMedia.com It appears to be the URL shortened and rehashed. This example was after I searched for "Sony PSZ-HA1T" without the quotes. The title for this page is <title></span><span class="html-tag">Sony 1TB Professional Portable External Hard Disk Drive (PSZ-HA1T)</span><span class="html-tag"></title> and the url is http://www.tapeandmedia.com/sony-1tb-professional-portable-hard-drive.asp Link to image: http://i.imgur.com/FmvAn6c.jpg Other searches (like "Sony 1tb PSZ-HA1T") yield normal looking SERP Titles Does anyone know why this happens and what I can do to avoid this? FmvAn6c.jpg
Technical SEO | | BWallacejr0 -
Website no longer visible Search Results
Overnight my website no longer appears in search engines for the two keywords I use. The website has been nicely climbing up (very steady progress to 42 and 73) the overnight it has vanished off the Radar. I have checked my webmaster account, no messages etc. Please can anyone shed any light on why this has happened? Website is http://www.securityjobsuk.co.uk Many thanks in advance for any help with this. D
Technical SEO | | SJUK0 -
Why my website main page suddenly disappear from Google search?
Hello friends, I need help . I lost everything , i don't know what happen to my website (hindustanfoods.com). My site is suddenly disappear from google search .. In 2013 it was on first page on top but suddenly this i lost my position not only position i lost from any pages. It is not showing anywhere. I have hosted a temp domain which links to some of the restaurant to our main (hindustanfoods.com) website and this website is seems good on google search where it has only 4 or 5 page website and main website has good pages. Somebody help should we need to work from start...................please help me
Technical SEO | | Tufail0 -
High search volume and low CTR
I have a two words domain with exact match keyword volume of over 1 millions local monthly search and CTR of 0.2% at average position of 6.6. Competition for this keywords is low. Shouldn't I be getting at least 5-10% at that position? Thanks, tb 7IhQQop.png
Technical SEO | | techbytes0 -
Why is a site search query being returned in SE results
Hello One of my top targeted keywords is now linking to the results page of an internal site search query (the search query is for my site url). Oddly, this page does not contain the targeted keywords. My site url used to be the highest ranking page for my targeted keywords. Can anybody advise why this is happening and how I can change it? Thanks Nick
Technical SEO | | PP_user0 -
Site Disappeared off of Search
A friend of mine has a site (http://bit.ly/q4iWkM ) that was ranking number one for their key word (Drimnagh() and has now completely disappeared off of the ranking. I did some checking and can't see a problem. She does have duplicate meta and titles throughout but this shouldn't be a punishable offence that I know of and is something that I am going to correct with a quick plugin install. I couldn't see any redirects or code stopping search either. When you do site:URL it shows up OK as well. She is client of mine (for website not for SEO) and she is really upset about it so any help from the forum would be appreciated. This isn't even a site I did but you couldn't get a better person to work with so I am eager to help where and if possible. Guinness all round if someone solves it next time you are in Ireland
Technical SEO | | kdaly1000 -
Can Search engines crawl this page
Hi guys, To put a long story short we have had to make a copy of our site and put it on another domain so in essence there are 2 copies of our site on the web.What we have done is put a username and password on the homepage - http://www.ughhwiki.co.uk/ now i just want to be 100% sure that the search engines cannot crawl this? Thank you Jon
Technical SEO | | imrubbish0