When Google announced that the new SERP snippets were to be customisable for various search results, this particularly excited SEO professionals, as this allowed space for enhancing your website results with schema, microformats, or the Google Search Console markup tool.
Most likely, the most used schema code was for enhancing products and services with ratings, star reviews and prices. The main purpose was to increase the click-through-rate (CTR) in Google’s results page.
Similar to any other Google feature, the aggregate ratings were soon embraced by SEO specialists, web developers and reviews companies, such as Trustpilot, Reevoo, Feefoo, Yotpo, eKomi and Embed Social. These businesses often used the Google search snippets as one of their main selling points.
However, issues started to develop when people were using snippets that were not designed for the original purpose of the page. For example, reviews and star ratings were displayed on the homepage of a brand, instead of highlighting the individual products and services that they offer.
So, what has changed?
Google has recently updated their algorithm, and now it seems that many SERP results were denied the stars that were associated with the homepages, as mentioned above. This is beneficial to the E-A-T rating of a website, as reviews need to be 100% true and trusted.
Here is an article about the Google Update on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, and more details on this article on Search Engine Land:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/making-review-rich-results-more-helpful.html
https://searchengineland.com/noticeable-drop-in-reviews-showing-in-google-search-results-322269
If you are looking to enhance your website with Rich Snippets, feel free to contact us or visit our CTR Optimisation page, where we use rich snippets and schema markup tools to make the most out of your website visibility.
