The day after I wrote about aggregated schema reviews and stars in Google search potentially being considered spam, I noticed that several people had lost their stars in search. For example, Yelp lost their star ratings in search.
I googled around and saw this article on SEO Rountable confirming he decline continued to spiral downwards over the last several days.
It will take some time to see if the changes stick or not.
This is a very grey area of Google search, at least for reviews for businesses, as described in my article above.
Have your stars disappeared? If you’ve experienced any changes in how your rich snippets are displayed please let us know below, and also let us know if your markup validates and if you were using JSON-LD or microdata, etc.
Update 1/13/2017: Most returned shortly after this article was published.
- Google “Pure Spam” Penalty Deindexes Sites March 6 2024 - March 12, 2024
- What Happened to ChicagoNow.com? - August 30, 2022
- The December 2021 Google Local Pack Algorithm Update - December 17, 2021
Hey there, thanks for posting this. We’re using JSON-LD markup and we noticed the dropoff in February as well for several thousand keywords. They’re not all gone, but a significant portion of them dropped off and several more seem to be fluctuating.
Hi Jon,
Sorry that I missed your comment and followed up so late. If the question is still relevant please feel free to email me and I will take a look for you.