Is this misuse of scheme data?

[designquotes]

A directory list page that uses the individual business page review data.

Instead of the scheme markup indicating the a particular business page has a review, the page that lists all of the businesses gets the review instead.

This means the list page can get hundreds of reviews which could potentially affect its SERPs.

A competitor is doing this now.

Is this an abuse of the system?

Should it be reported?

How does on report this kind of this?

[TomRayner]

Hi there

First of all, it should be remembered that the schema markup itself will not effect rankings - it is not a ranking factor.  However, it will most likely effect click through rate - and so any gaming of the system would be seen as manipulative.

I think what you have described does exactly that - it manipulates the rich snippet in Google search by aggregating reviews of hundreds of other websites to pass off as its own.  Pretty clear cut and shouldn't be happening.

Google's algorithmic detection of this appears to be lacking at the moment, but they do have a rich snippet spam reporting tool, which you can find here, which allows you to report anything that you think is spammy.

Hope this helps.

[retailgeek]

Does the directory page show ratings and reviews (or review snippits) that are viewable by visitors to the page?  If so, wrapping those elements in schema.org (or other structure schemes that correctly tag the structured data) does not feel like abuse.

The follow-up questions becomes, does that site have the right to show the reviews/ratings they are showing?  This is a somewhat grey area at the moment.  Google themselves, used to frequently summarize reviews from other sites without those sites permission (http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/21/google-places-stops-stealing-reviews/) and when they did so, they certainly did wrap the reviews in structured data tags.   The IP owner usually wants Google (and other media) to promote its site, and is usually happy for them to use small snippits of their content to do so (that's the whole premise of Google Search). Where the grey area comes in, is when the "promotional" or "editorial" use starts to compete with the original content owners use-case  (as happened when Yelp reviews were showing up on Google Plus Places pages).

At the very least, you could use google to see who else has the same reviews as the directory page you are competing with, and then see if one of those sites is the intellectual property owner, and if they want to assert their rights.

So in summary, I don't think using schema.org is abuse (if the data marked up, is in fact accurately tagged), but the site does need to have the rights to the review content they are using.

[designquotes]

Thanks for the insighful responses.

I need to clarify one point.

They are not aggregating reviews from around the web. Instead they have business profiles which include reviews. Instead of the business' profile page using the mark up, the directory page that lists each of the businesses uses the mark up.

So if there are 50 businesses in a category with 1 review each, the category page shows up in SERPs with 50 reviews.

This would affect CTRs as you pointed out.

Is this considered manipulation?