WordPress offers unlimited opportunities to create different type of content. Product reviews are one of the popular among bloggers as they appear as a rich snippet in Google Search results. Genuine reviews not only help users but also help the bloggers to earn revenue from affiliate commissions. However, Google will not show the product reviews in rich snippet format when they have validation errors. Using invalid price format in reviews is one such problem that prevents your reviews appearing with star ratings.
Where to Find Review Errors?
Though you can validate your reviews with Google rich snippet testing tools, the easy way is to get the details from Google Search Console account.
- Login to your Google Search Console account and select your website property.
- Navigate to “Enhancements > Review Snippets” and check whether you find any errors.
- However, sometime Google works strangely and show your reviews under “Products” section.
- As you can see in the below screenshot, you will find “Invalid price format in property “price” error.
Finding More Details About Invalid Price Format
After finding the price format error, click on it to view the affected URLs. Click on any of the affected URL to view the instance of the error on your page. In the below example the price on the page shows as “Free”.
You can click on the “Inspect” option showing on lower right corner to see the details from Google indexed page.
Alternatively, you can test the live URL with URL Inspection tool to find the details from your live page.
Price Property Format
Product reviews need the schema to be in the correct format. You can go to Google developers documentation section and find the correct format needed for each review type. For product review, the price should be a number and can’t be a text like “Free”.
In addition, the price currency should be three letters ISO format like USD. Hence, avoid providing currency symbol like $. However, currency is not a required property, it is a recommended property. So, you will see only warning message and this may not affect the rich snippet appearance in search result.
Fixing Invalid Price Format in Property Price
As the root cause is clear, we have to edit the product review and assign the number in the price filed. We use WP Review Pro plugin for creating reviews. Though it is kind of outdated plugin, it helps to create beautiful review. You can edit the review meta box content easily and modify the details.
Since the value is 0, we do not provide any currency. Otherwise, make sure to type the correct ISO currency instead of using symbol. You may need to follow different instructions depending upon the plugin or theme you use for review to update the review price details. After publishing modified review, make sure to clear your cache if you are using server side caching.
Note that if you do not enter the price as 0.0 for free, you will see a missing field “price” error in Google Search Console. As a result, your review will not appear in search as a rich snippet. Therefore, provide the price as 0.0 for free items.
Validation in Google Search Console
Now, go back to search console and click on the small Inspect URL search box showing at the end of the affected URL.
This will fetch the details from Google indexed page and still show you the price format error in the product review. Now, click on the “Test Live URL” button.
After few minutes, you will get the result from the live URL. If you have updated your review properly, the URL should show valid or valid with warnings.
Scroll down and check the details of the page to confirm the price field will show the number value now. the warning appears because of the missing fields like price currency. However, items with warnings are eligible for showing in Google search as rich snippets. So, you need not to worry about that.
You have to fix all affected URLs and then submit “Validate Fix” button to remove the errors from Google Search Console.
After submitting the validation, you will receive an email about the details and Google will validate the live pages.
Wait for few days and check back in Google Search Console to confirm all submitted reviews are validated as “Passed”.
You may need to wait some more days for the review snippet to appear back in Google with rich result.
Final Words
As mentioned, WordPress allows you to create reviews easily with the use of plugins. However, writing review of your own product is different than writing review of other’s products like themes, plugins or hosting services. Most of the review plugins are not using the latest review guidelines from Google. In addition, they do not stop when entering invalid text price format in review price field that needs a number. Your reviews will never appear as rich results in Google, if you use outdated plugin or not validating the structured data. You can visit Google Search Console to check and fix the errors. Also if needed, change the review plugin that offers all guidelines and validations to avoid errors.
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