Google Stopped Displaying Rich Snippets Stars
-
Background
- Google stopped displaying stars next to the website "szallas.hu" in the SERPs, eg: http://goo.gl/RXSS58
- Google used to display the stars
- there is no technical problem, since I can see the stars in the Rich Snippet Testing Tool: http://goo.gl/bQUSNr
Why did Google stop showing the stars? What can I do? I already filled in a form at https://support.google.com/webmasters/contact/rich_snippets_feedback.
-
It could just be Google re-shuffling things and fine-tuning who gets stars and who doesn't. Here are a few things that have helped in my experience:
- Don't go crazy with the schema markup, especially for stars. I see people adding ratings to blog posts just to get stars, and those are all gone now. Add them where they make sense and are conventionally used (e.g. on product/place pages, not on category/type pages).
- Avoid re-using the same aggregate ratings or reviews that go into aggregate ratings on multiple pages.
- Make sure you've nested the right tags in the right orders according to the latest rules - they change sometimes. Sometimes the snippet tool will say something's correct when it's really out of order.
- Tag entities, not keywords. E.g. don't tag the entity as "The Marriottt Inn, Resort, and Spa in City, State" - tag it as "Marriott" or "Marriott Hotel" and list the location separately.
If you're doing all these things it might just be a matter of weak entity association, borderline user metrics, or insufficient site trust.
-
If you check the SERP I've provided, you can see, that all the competitors actually have the stars. Some kind of quality issue may be the cause, but can't think of any valid reason.
What could cause the removal of the stars? Because szallas.hu is the biggest player in the field (in hungary), all the reviews are real without any manipulation, spam or whatsoever.
Maybe too many reviews for a few hotels? But that's ridiculous, since what can I do if we have that much reviews for popular hotels? And what about the thousands of hotels with just 1 or 2 reviews?
Can't wrap my head around this issue, I really have no idea what could make Google think that there is some spamming going on.
-
Google has been planning to scale back on the frequency of rich snippets. Matt Cutts mentioned this to an extent at PubCon in October (link). Google has also recently begun going after those that have spammed and/or manipulated rich snippets in a deceptive manner (link). Your stars disappearing may just be part of the changes in the works.
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 Parsing jQuery Links as Real Links
While trying to diagnose a recent Google penalty I found out that links were being parsed by Google even though they were made using jQuery. I had the linkify plugin on my site and configured it to convert URLs to links on all of my pages. Today I found links to other sites of mine from sites that should not have been linking to them and found that the links came from pages whose links were generated via jQuery. This makes me wonder, how do I know if Google is counting javascript generated links? Is it possible that my native ad widgets are creating links that Google might count? Since I don't own any of the sites that advertise via the widgets I don't know how to tell if they are getting link juice or not. It used to be that Google didn't parse javascript, so you could add as many links to your site via javascript as you wanted without being seen by Google as linking to those sites. Does anyone know of a jQuery plugin that does turn URLs into clickable links that Google won't parse as real links?
On-Page Optimization | | STDCarriers0 -
Tag Clouds in Google Despite Canonical Links for Single Tags/Articles
I am frustrated to see a lot tag clouds in Google even though I programmed my tagged pages to display a canonical link to the linking article if the is only one result for the tag cloud. The goal to to make sure that the article, which is of better quality than the tag page, ends up in Google without a bunch of thin tag pages getting in there. For instance this article should be in Google and this tag should not be because that tag has a canonical URL for that article. I do not have a lot of experience with tag cloud SEO because I prefer to limit such pages to categories, but I have found tag clouds to be important for aggregating information for specific issues, people, or places that are not already a site category. Some tags I have used to power social media pages that update automatically from RSS feeds for their related tag archives. That is quite useful for pages like that. Should I start using Meta noindex for those instead of rel canonical? I have already done that for author profiles because author profiles get a lot of on site links compared to individual articles because my gridviews use javascript for paging. The same is true for the tags, so if a tag is tagged in 30 articles it will have links from 30 articles but if those articles are not in the latest 20 for that tag only the latest 20 will have links back from the tag archive. I also suspect having a lot of tag pages with little content to negatively impact my indexing rate. I will see a number of recent tag pages added before new articles.
On-Page Optimization | | CopBlaster.com0 -
Webmaster sitemap how to tell Google to recheck and no of times to check a day?
Webmaster sitemap how to tell Google to recheck and no of times to check a day? But how often google check if the sitemap version changed and how to notify google about the change happened
On-Page Optimization | | bsharath0 -
Site not showing up in Google search since move
Hi, hoping someone might help me with some answer(s) as to why our site no longer shows up in Google search results. Even when we type the full name and city into Google, the site is absent. Our Facebook page, LinkedIn and some backlinks show, but our site is missing. I can no longer find it in Google places. I'm sure I've done something wrong since moving from a static (flash-based) site to Wordpress. But the robots.txt file looks okay to me and the sitemap.xml file is present. Anyway, this is what happens when you ask a network technician handle website design... We know just enough to be dangerous! Here is the site in question: www.newfrontiertechnologies.com located in Shoreline WA. Any advice is much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | NFTECH0 -
Google indexing
Hi In my site I have 2 blogs, the first blog is a standard blog, every post is informative and over 6oo words with pictures and all of them are keyworded. The second blog is basically a journal of bike rides i go on, with a picture and about 100 - 300 word writeup. I use a portfolio plugin to get this online. My question is should I noindex nofollow all of these posts. Im not sure if google will see it as a lot of uninformative noncene, I dont write these as blog posts they are a journal I post 1 or 2 a day. What is the normal practice for this... they are not keyworded or seo'd I dont want them to affect my seo or rankings. Thanks Chris
On-Page Optimization | | mrcsleonard0 -
Should I Remove This Subdirectory From Google?
On my site, I have a subdirectory. It posts articles from a bunch of websites that my readers are interested in & links back to all of those sites. There is no original content in it. There are over 1700 indexed pages in this subdirectory. The rest of my site has about 500 (all original content). The search engine traffic for this subdirectory only accounts for 3.9% of my sites overall visits. Should I consider removing this subdirectory? Could all the duplicate content be hurting the rankings of my legit pages? What do you all think?
On-Page Optimization | | PedroAndJobu0 -
Advice on why page isn't being indexed in google top 1000 for keyword
Hi, http://www.cgcomposites.com.au/composite-material.html This page isn't listed for keywords 'composite material' It has been live for a few weeks and gets grade A report for onpage optimisation? regards Michael
On-Page Optimization | | bluelilyseo0 -
Are Content in Inline Javascript and Collapsible Considered Cloaking to Google?
Hi, I would like to save space in my website and do not want my other products to be pushed down below the first fold. In order to do that, I have decided to add content inside inline javascript or using collapsible. For collapsible, I may be using "show/hide" button or "read more" button to show the whole content. So does content in Javascript and collapsible considered hiding from Google? If it is, then I have to think of other options. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | globalsources.com0