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I now realize that it's against Google's guidelines to markup reviews that aren't generated on your site!

Nevermind!

Hello Moz Community,

I am finally getting around to creating markup for a bunch of the sites we work with using JSON-LD. I have a question specifically regarding adding review markup for a local restaurant.

It's my understanding that putting the aggregate rating on the homepage never results in stars being shown in the SERP's.

So what would be the best practice for taking advantage of all the great Google reviews we've accumulated over the years? These are reviews for the restaurant in general and not for any specific service or product.

Should I create a reviews page on the site and use the markup there?

Thanks for any and all suggestions.

Hey Miss Thurman,

Great question. No doubt you've been googling ways to quickly increase your site's rankings and one of those is to get external links and one of the easiest ways to get external links is to put your info on a ton of online directories... Unfortunately that information is outdated. Nowadays, the links you receive from online directories are basically worthless. The only thing the directories are good for any more is having your business info out there for other people to find.

So I highly recommend that you check local directories to ensure that your business information is correct, but beyond that, I wouldn't worry about them that much. MOZ has a service called Local Listing which will automatically update your businesses' info across a number of listing sites, that others also pull their info from. It keeps you up to date on your submissions, whether there is a duplicate listing, or incorrect listings that need to be removed (some they remove for you, others must be removed by you).

This is a great bit of insight! Thank you for bringing it to the community! I have to say that from an outside observer/regular traveler point of view... I would agree to the premise of this post. I personally check exactly what my room and other rooms look like, how nice the pool is and if there is an onsite gym before I make a purchase decision. I could care less about the face of the Hotel, or the parking situation, as long as my room has a desk, a nice bed and a spacious bathroom.

We don't currently represent any Hotels or B&B's with our SEO Services, but we do represent a number of Assisted Living businesses and I'll be bringing this up at our next monthly meeting with them. Could bolster their residency percentages.

Hey A_Q,

This is a bit of a two fold answer.. No there isn't a way to force Google to use your META description, but there are ways to better ensure Google uses the best snippets from your site in conjunction with your META descriptions. Here is a great write up by the people of MOZ. It should help you out some....: https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

I have an SEO question for you: My client is building a new website and wondered about individual pages for his items, let me break it down for you...

He sells display cabinets, one of which is a shot glass cabinet. He has 5 types of the shot glass cabinets, that come in 3 different types of wood, 2 different mirrored backings, and with or without a locking mechanism...

Now is it better, SEO-wise, to create 5 pages for his shot glasses, with the selectable options, or is it better to create a different page for each of his shot glass cabinet options? This would mean something like 24 different shot glass pages.

He feels that the more pages he has, the more lines he's throwing out there looking for a bite, but he, and I, don't know if that is necessarily a good thing for SEO. The pages would be named slightly differently, but the copy on each page would read just about the same...

What do you think? 5 pages with options, or 24 pages again with the ability to change the options.

Side Question: If more pages is the way to go, what would be the draw back when he does this with his other 8 cabinet types and their multitude of configurations?

Thanks for the help!

I clicked the +connect another facebook account, went through all the steps, and when I was redirected back to my moz setup the facebook account wasn't there to "track this profile"

I tried clicking the "another facebook" button a hundred times and it won't let me re-do the process, it doesn't do anything. It also won't let me click the "Next" button eventhough I got it to register my google+ stuff. Where do I go from here??

Hey A_Q,

This is a bit of a two fold answer.. No there isn't a way to force Google to use your META description, but there are ways to better ensure Google uses the best snippets from your site in conjunction with your META descriptions. Here is a great write up by the people of MOZ. It should help you out some....: https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

Hey Miss Thurman,

Great question. No doubt you've been googling ways to quickly increase your site's rankings and one of those is to get external links and one of the easiest ways to get external links is to put your info on a ton of online directories... Unfortunately that information is outdated. Nowadays, the links you receive from online directories are basically worthless. The only thing the directories are good for any more is having your business info out there for other people to find.

So I highly recommend that you check local directories to ensure that your business information is correct, but beyond that, I wouldn't worry about them that much. MOZ has a service called Local Listing which will automatically update your businesses' info across a number of listing sites, that others also pull their info from. It keeps you up to date on your submissions, whether there is a duplicate listing, or incorrect listings that need to be removed (some they remove for you, others must be removed by you).