Incorrect structured data might remove rich snippets

Hi Simon and Nuanced media,

I received the same email! for https://www.goochelaar.eu
I can’t find what the problem is.

Is it maybe because all my reviews are connected to one categorie?
Hope there is a solution to this!

Hi Jochemn,

From what I can determine, it’s not the category that’s the problem. It’s the aggregated result that is using schema markup for a product when it should be a review

Best wishes,

Simon

Hi, I’m looking at this issue as well, but hard to find out what exactly is happening.

Looking at the examples Google gives for the aggregated rating, I see the example refers to schema.org/Thing. This suggests product would serve as well. The example doesn’t use the review type for the aggregated rating.

I suspect the issue is rather that the reviews themselves are not linked to a specific product. This part:

<span itemprop="itemReviewed" itemscope="" itemtype="https://schema.org/Product">
<div class="rr_review_post_id" itemprop="name" style="display:none;">
<a href="https://www.domain.com/reviews/">shows</a></div>
</span>

Does not link to a product page, but to the reviews page. So in our case, I tend to try creating a specific product page, then put the reviews on that page. All reviews will then link to that product page.

Hi Rogier,

Thing is, we have the aggregated count in the footer of every page and we also have a review page with all the latest reviews. However, it’s just a standard page…If I have understood correctly, it’s not setup as a product page as you’ve described on your website.

Here’s a screen to our Reviews page on our site and a snippet of code from Google showing that even on our review page it is showing as a product:

Screenshot

It’s very frustrating, I love this plugin but if it’s causing us issues with Google then we need to get it fixed ASAP.

??

harpo1984,

I have seen people have success with this changing the the Product schema type to Store or Service. At the moment changing the schema type is not an integrated option, I will be adding it in the near future, but simply don’t have the time right now. In the meantime however, it is fairly simple to edit the snippet markup directly in the plugin. The file you are looking for is views/frontend/snippets.php

Let me know if you need more information,
Thanks,
Charlie Maxwell
[NM_Developer]

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for the advice. I tried changing lines 1 and 30 from:

<div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Product">

to:

<div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Review">

and ran through the Structured Data Tool which produced the following errors for the Aggregate Rating:

The aggregateRating property inside a Review object applies to the review itself, as a creative work. Did you mean to use reviewRating instead?
cancelauthor
A value for the author field is required.
cancel
The review has no reviewed item specified.

So I changed lines 11 and 37 from:

<span itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/aggregateRating">

to:

<span itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/reviewRating">

Which gives me the following errors: Screenshot

I’m definitely making things worse Charlie, can you please help?

Kind regards,

Simon

linking the reviews to specific products/pages didn’t help…

@simon: As I understand Charlie, you could try changing
<div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Product">
into
<div itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Service">

Not into “review”. If you do, you’ll have to change the snippet in shortcodes/rr-show.php into “Service” as well.

I’m going to test that now, and see if it helps, but that would really surprise me.

I’m also going to try removing the aggregate review altogether, because I want to know if that is the cause of this issue.

Any updates on this issue @rogier?

@charlie, can you please help?

Kind regards,

Simon

I’m currently waiting for Google to check the changes. If I find anything I’ll let you know.

Yes, sorry.

So this has been an ongoing wrestling match with Google, and finding a solution will be different case by case depending on the content of your site. As Rogier pointed out, the Review types do not need changing, as AggregateRating schema is nested inside of a Thing. As in the this Thing has this AggregateRating. And itemReviewed review schema nests a Thing data object inside of a Review element, as in a Review concerning this Thing. Now, the Thing can be any of the Schema.org type classifications. by default this type is Product, however as many of you have pointed out, you can alter this in the plugin directly for aggregate ratings in views/frontend/snippets.php and for individual reviews in shortcodes/rr-show.php. I recommended above to try using either Shop for general merchants or Service, however for the best chance of getting this working properly I recommend taking a look at Schema.org types yourself and trying to find the best fit for your case. Editing this schema type will be an option in the admin panel in the next update to make this more accessible and easy to debug. Aside from the type issue, I have seen some trouble from hiding the actual display of certain schema markup. For instance I might suggest to try setting the option to display titles in the individual reviews head. This will display the category as the subject of review, or a fallback value, or post title from origin post. I would also recommend setting a fallback in the Rich Markup Settings and setting the use case to be used when no category is specified. Also for visibility consider turning off the star snippets for aggregate ratings, this will display your overall rating as plain text, which may have more luck with Google. In addition, I recommend having all of the other Rich Markup Settings set to ensure you are providing as robust and full data to Google’s bots as possible.

I apologize for the uncertainty in a solution, this is simply something that is seemingly changing all the time and it has been very difficult to keep pace with Google’s ever changing specificity for data requirements. The best course of action is to continue sharing successes and failures here in hopes that someone else’s configuration may also be the setup that works for you. I am currently experimenting with a few different configurations on live domains that have received the same notice, and will obviously keep everyone posted on my findings.

Thanks for your patience,
Charlie Maxwell
[NM_Developer]

Hi Charlie,

Thanks again for coming back to me and for the detailed response. I really appreciate it. I have implemented some of your suggestions (hopefully, correctly) and I will let you know how I get on.

However, I was wondering about one of your last suggestions for the Rich URL Options of you plugin where it says:

Rich URL Options

Include URL rich data – This will add a block of markup to the reviews output to communicate a URL value for rich schema.

The URL to use in your Rich Markup.
https://

What URL do I put in the field to use for my Rich Markup?

Kind regards,

Simon

@rogier @charlie

I still need help with the final question in my last response, however, in the meantime, I have submitted a manual review to Google to restore our rich snippets in Google Search.

Changing the views/frontend/snippets.php and for individual reviews in shortcodes/rr-show.php. both to Service has removed all the warning/errors for this site in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

I will let you know how the manual review goes (It may take some time according to Google)

Kind regards,

Simon

Got a message that Google has accepted the changes. I changed two thing:

– Removed aggregate review
– Changed “product” into “service” in the reviews.

I suspect the aggregate review was causing the issue, but this needs testing.

@rogier

Google has approved my changes too and everything is fine again!

Awesome news!