Why My Star Reviews Missing in Google Search?

Whenever you read an online review – there are two parts to it. One is, a genuine review helps users buying a correct product they need. Other part is, many website owners will get affiliate income when users buy products clicking links from their site. It is called link cloaking, a prominent way to make money with affiliate marketing. If you are a website owner focusing affiliate marketing with product reviews, it is essential to show up your site’s review ratings in Google search results.

If you are struggling to get your review stars in Google, here are the reasons.

Why Star Reviews Missing in Google?

We will cover the following topics in this article.

• Use correct schema
• No self-reviews
• Don’t embed reviews
• Validate schema errors
• Google needs time
• Site’s reliability

1. You Are Not Using Correct Schema

In order to create a review post, you should use the structured data with appropriate schema. Earlier days Google supported many schemas to show in the search results. However, at the end of 2019, Google updated the algorithm and limited the type of reviews to show in the search results. Here is an excerpt from Google’s announcement and you can check out the full details in Google Webmasters blog.

While, technically, you can attach review markup to any schema type, for many types displaying star reviews does not add much value for the user. With this change, we’re limiting the pool of schema types that can potentially trigger review rich results in search. Specifically, we’ll only display reviews with those types (and their respective subtypes):

Here are the types of reviews currently Google supports in the search results.

Book	Course
Creative Work Season	Creative Work Series
Episode	Event
Game	How To
Local Business	Media Object
Music Playlist	Movie
Music Recording	Organization
Product	Recipe
Software Application

Adding a schema is more technical depends on how you create your website. Content management systems like WordPress has plenty of plugins to quickly add structured data to your site. For example, you can use WP Review Pro plugin to create a full-fledged review website. Check out the official schema.org site to understand more about structured data.

2. Self-Reviews Are Not Shown in Google

Are you writing a self-review of your own products? Google stopped showing the self-reviews posted on the own websites. If you have a product and writing a review of your own product on your website, Google will not show in searches.

3. Review Widget Embeds

There are online tools to create a review which you can embed on your website. Though this is an easy way to create reviews, Google will not show the embedded widget reviews in search results. Therefore, ensure to write the review on your own site with appropriate structured data schema.

4. Your Review Pages Have Structured Data Errors

Google has a structured data tool to validate the errors on your review pages. Access the tool and type your review page URL to check the errors.

If you are not able to resolve the errors yourself, get the support of developers to resolve the errors.

What we have noticed is that though there are errors in the tool, Google still shows the reviews based on the available structured data.  

5. Google Needs Time

During initial days when we wrote product reviews, Google never show up the reviews in search results page. Though the review posts appeared in the searches, we could not see the star ratings.

It took couple of years for the star rating to appear slowly. Therefore, if you have everything right then wait some time for Google to show up your ratings.

Checkout examples of review posts on your site here and here.

6. Site’s Reliability

Besides time factor we have also noticed Google quickly shows the rich snippets from reliable sites compared to new websites. This is logical as they are dedicated sites for writing product reviews with large userbase. When you have few review posts on a bigger and general blog, it is oblivious that Google will not rely your reviews quickly. Therefore, ensure to write reviews related to your niche and try to increase the reachability to users through social and email marketing. Over the period, it will add value to your reviews and Google will start showing your ratings.

Final Words

Reviews can help to attract users and increase the click through rate in search results. However, creating a genuine review needs lot of time and sometimes investment of money to buy the products. We hope the above mentioned points helped you to understand why your star reviews are not showing in Google. Work on the mistakes and correct the reviews as per latest Google’s guidelines to bring your stars back in search results.