Google Review Rich Snippets Drop

Google has announced this week (18/09) a new algorithmic update to not show review markup in the Google Search Results Pages for specific cases. If you want to know more then see the new rules over here.

And it looks like Google is acting on it, which in some news it’s a great thing, by using Schema markup for reviews users can typically fake their review counts. You may have come across businesses with stupidly high reviews in the rich snippets yet have no reviews on the product or service itself on the page? We have seen it and it’s not good!

According to Moz and RankRanger‘s tools there is a 4 to 5 point drop in the rate these review rich results show up in Google search.

So go ahead, search a specific keyword that usually brings up rich snippets such as reviews and see if your competition have lost their Schema Markup for reviews!

Moz is showing a dip from 39.2% of the search results showing review rich results to 35.8%: