Self proclaimed 5 stars showing in organic search??

[daveyboy]

Hi there - I've just come across this site that has ratings showing in the organic listings, yet - I can't see any ratings for it online - other than a text listing on the site's own home page?

The site in question has a facebook page with no followers, and a twitter account with the same, no google plus account, no google local maps listing.

I've only ever seen "actual" google reviews and other citations being combined, averaged - then shown in search as an aggregated number.

Is it just me - or does Google accept these self rated reviews on face value??!!

See images attached...

The URL of the site is here: http://www.home-securitysystems.com.au

The search phrase they rank no.1 for is "Alarm System Melbourne" - which is pretty decent.

Any ideas?

Cheers, Dave

oi86 oi8o

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi David,

Welcome to the grey area of SEO, according to the rules of Google you're not allowed to mark up your reviews with the proper schemas when you don't show the complete reviews about your company or service. So as long as you don't show them you can tell Google whatever kind of reviews you have since nobody is going to make sure that's really the case. So indeed Google's just accepting the reviews on faced value. They're automatically approving them since about 1,5 years and if you ask me it didn't increase the quality of the results.

In this case they marked up the text with the rich snippet data for reviews, more info could be found here. There's not much you can do about this, you could try and file a spam request but that's really a long shot.

Hope this helps!

[Gijsbert]

https://support.google.com/webmasters/contact/rich_snippets_spam?hl=en

[daveyboy]

It would appear they've just added a rich snippet from schema.org to the page:

Home Solar Panels

Rated 5/5 based on 145 reviews

There's an interesting article on CTR's (related to schema markup) here: http://www.themediaflow.com/2013/05/implementing-schema-to-increase-search-traffic/

But still - I agree, false markup, false reviews = spam.

Thanks for the responses!!