Review Schema Markup Needs Amendments

I tried writing to support about this months ago, no response… let’s see if there’ll be any here.

Hi Support, I hope your are reading this. Are you going to fix this Schema Error? Every review item is still creating an Error in the LocalBusiness Schema. I will have to uninstall and find an alternative until this is fixed.

I’m not sure what it is whining about for a “name” field. That is perhaps another microformat snippet being output on your pages that is different from the plugin. Not sure without knowing the URL to see for myself.

Google doesn’t require image for the review snippet. Their validator says it is required, but it is not. Plenty of people receive star ratings in SERPs without them, and the test we did with including image didn’t change anything. It’s a recommendation, not a requirement. If it was a requirement, they wouldn’t accept the snippet and display it in SERPs.

That all being said, we do have plans to update it from the HTML markup format to ld+json format, which is less prone to issues with themes and such, and allows for easier customization on the website as the information being displayed doesn’t have to look weird to match the requirements of the HTML snippet. Don’t have a timeline on it yet, but we’re testing it out.

Thanks for the nudge to address this.

While our internal testing has shown no difference in SERP rich snippets regardless of the missing or present image field, I have implemented a non-ideal solution in the meantime by using a 1×1 transparent image for now. We’ll have to think about how to upgrade the plugin to use a provided image for business/product posts, as we can’t do too much automatic without making some assumptions on how images are used on any given site for posts to know which image is the “right” one. The topic of when rich snippets appear is always a tricky one too.. sometimes they show for a tiny site, but don’t for a larger site, and vice-versa.. there is nothing I have found to determine the magical Google sauce for their appearance.

The same goes for the priceRange field. This data doesn’t currently exist on any of the review posts, so we can’t do anything about the past, just add the field in a future update so that site admins can utilize this field going forward.

Version 3.2.0 has just been released with the 1×1 stop-gap solution, some other similar fixes, and performance improvements. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

You can edit the business name on the page which has WP Customer Reviews enabled on it. For businesses, this is sometimes the same page that is showing the reviews, but if not, you should be able to find it. There is basically a checkbox to enable the plugin when editing the post, and then fields to fill out the business information.

Version 3.2.0 was just released also, which displays the name of the site if this information is missing, but it should be filled out to be proper.