Rich Snippets - What am I doing wrong

[bfrl]

Hi all,

This is my first post and I really hope someone in here can point me in the right direction.

Background:
I added Rich Snippets code to the footer of my site, tested it on http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets which all looks good. I was attempting to link reviews for our brand rather than specific products as these product reviews aren't available.

Result:
Every page on my site contained the same rich snippets code and within a couple of days all the site pages were indexed including review stars. After another couple of weeks the review stars were removed from every page on the next crawl/index.

Next Steps:
I removed Rich Snippets code from every page except my home page. The rich review stars appeared in the search results for a couple of days but in the past two weeks they have since disappeared again.

What next?
I appreciate that I went about the implementation incorrectly but at this time only the home page contains valid mark up but no review stars in search.

Has anyone got experience or advice to help me out in this situation?

Many thanks.

[riplash]

It would be useful to have more information, the URL in question for example, or the Rich Snippets markup you are using. Wouldn't like to make any assumptions about your implementation, but to me it sounds like you are trying to use reviews of your company with "Product" markup?

[bfrl]

Hi risplash,

Thanks for the response.

I'm afraid I can't share the company name for certain reasons. I have pasted the mark up below and replaced the company name section. I hope this helps somewhat.

Item
Type: http://data-vocabulary.org/review-aggregate
itemreviewed = COMPANY NAMErating = Item( 1 )
count = 48

Item 1
Type: http://data-vocabulary.org/rating
average = 4.7
best = 5

[riplash]

Ok I see, understandable - thanks for posting the Rich Snippets data instead.

In our experience, Google isn't showing stars in the SERPs for Organisations/Corporations, but they are for Places. This makes it possible to use schema.org's LocalBusiness with your company reviews, for which Google is showing stars in the SERPs, and this is how we've seen many companies serving up their ratings.

To my mind, it's perfectly legitimate to use LocalBusiness on pages that relate to real world locations, on your homepage if you have a single location, or on outlet-specific pages for businesses with multiple locations.

My assumption would be is that Google first interpreted your aggregate rating data as relating to a product, which is why you got stars showing. They subsequently determined the data was related to your organisation instead, and removed the stars.

I have absolutely no idea whether this would have been algorithmic or manual, but I've certainly seen a bit of a cleanup in the SERPs in recent weeks, and murmurings in the SEO world to that effect too - see http://www.seroundtable.com/less-google-rich-snippet-15216.html for one example.