SCHEMA Review Markup Check & Questions

[kirmeliux]

Hi,

I have a few questions about our SCHEMA for user-submitted business reviews. Here's what I have so far:

User Review

Reviewer Name

Business Name
05/14/2014

5

1. Am I missing anything?

2. Is the itemReviewed tag necessary?

3. If a category/results page has multiple businesses listed and shows their ratings, is marking the businesses up as you would on their individual page okay? What about the ratings? I have a feeling marking the ratings would confuse Google, but the businesses themselves (NAP) should be alright, correct?

4. General Q: Is it alright to have multiple reviewBody tags within one review? For instance, if the review is split into 2 parts and additional code/content is between them that isn't part of the review, can we just add multiple reviewBody tags within the same main div tag?

Thanks!

[David-Kley]

For what you are trying to do, it seems like the aggregate review type would be a much better fit. With the standard review type, Google will only recognise the first review, and display that one in results.

http://schema.org/AggregateRating

"If a category/results page has multiple businesses listed and shows their ratings, is marking the businesses up as you would on their individual page okay?"

I would only markup the code for the business' on their individual page, not have them all marked up on one page. I highly doubt it would get picked up and display properly in the SERP.

"Is the itemReviewed tag necessary?"

I assume you are trying to get rid of this due to the display? On some schema markup, you can replace the "meta" with a "span" tag to remove text you dont want to display. This will remove it from being seen, but still allow the snippet to be indexed correctly.

[kirmeliux]

Thanks for the response, David.

1. We are using aggregate reviews for the overall business rating, yes. But we'll still need to markup the reviews on the page, correct? I was sure that if you have a reviewCount, you should mark up the reviews on the page as well.

2. Are there any negative consequences to properly marking up businesses on results/category pages? I've noticed many large review sites do this.

3. Well, I am asking because shouldn't it be obvious the reviews on the page are related to the page content, which has already been identified as LocalBusiness with a specific name?

I also already have it as span and it's still displaying.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Kirmeliux,

I need to confess I'm not aces at interpreting code! If you're using this:

http://schema-creator.org/review.php

...you shouldn't be missing anything.

This is a very good tutorial:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2223886/How-to-Add-Reviews-to-Your-Site-Using-Schema-Structured-Data-Markup

Could you please describe what the end result is you're hoping to achieve with what you're doing to put your questions in a clearer context, please? You mention multiple businesses on the same page. Is this a directory site or something like that? What are you hoping to achieve with multiple reviewBody tags...why do you want to remove itemReviewed, etc?

I'm hoping I can provide better insight once I better understand the situation.

[kirmeliux]

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for the response. I've read the article you linked before, but it actually deals with a single personal review on a page and not multiple reviews and aggregate ratings, both of which are my target.

The end result will be a few things:

1. A company profile page which lists their business information and hosts their user-submitted reviews. Our plan is to mark up the business information (no problem on this front), the aggregate data (no problem on this front), as well as the user reviews themselves (this is what I'm having questions about).

2. We'll also have category pages (not WordPress-esque category pages) that feature a few businesses at once. I'm curious how Google would handle each business wrapped in regular LocalBusiness code only (I'm aware ratings would confuse Google).

I'm hoping someone can provide insight on, A) The code I submitted above (the generators give off different code which Google's tool won't validate. My version validates, but I want to double check), B) Whether or not marking 3 different businesses with LocalBusiness SCHEMA on a single page is bad, and C) If we can utilize multiple reviewBody tags within the same review DIV.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Kirmeliux,

You've provided excellent details on this. Unfortunately, I don't have first-hand experience with the situation you're describing of setting up good Schema for a multi-business, multi-review website with multiple different companies on the same pages.

I am going to ask for additional feedback from the staff on this question, because it's a really good one, and just not something one runs into every day. In the meantime, I sincerely hope members with experience of this will chime in and help!

[David-Kley]

The best way to have this done effectively is to have multiple listings for businesses on one page, such as in a category, and then have those linked to an individual business page. On that individual business page you can then have organizational markup, review markup, and anything else that may be useful.

I have never seen something that had multiple business organisation markup on one page and to be honest I'm not sure how Google would display that information if they would display it at all.

[kirmeliux]

Miriam,

Thank you for your help and extra thanks for trying to solicit help from additional Mozzers. I seem to only run into difficult issues that nobody can answer one way or the other these days! Such is life in the cold, SEO world though, hehe.

David,

Thanks for the response!

"The best way to have this done effectively is to have multiple listings for businesses on one page, such as in a category, and then have those linked to an individual business page. On that individual business page you can then have organizational markup, review markup, and anything else that may be useful."

This is exactly how we're currently setup. Our individual business pages are good to go with proper markup (assuming the sample code I pasted for reviewBody is okay). I'm just curious about using markup on the "category" pages.

"I have never seen something that had multiple business organisation markup on one page and to be honest I'm not sure how Google would display that information if they would display it at all."

You can see an example on a very big site here. It doesn't display any of the business information in rich snippets, and they've avoided aggregate snippets (as would I since that definitely would confuse Google IMO), but it seems to be fine with the fact the businesses are all marked up.

I would assume that at the worst, Google ignores it for rich snippets and it doesn't have a negative consequence. And at best, it helps Google understand better that these businesses fit within the niche/keywords/content of the page itself. I'd love insight though since the "category" pages are ones we're interested in ranking for, mostly.

[David-Mihm]

Google is unlikely to show schema markup for reviews on category pages.  Yelp does not get these snippets on their category pages like this one and yet invariably gets them on individual business profile pages.

[kirmeliux]

Thanks for the response, David. I think we'll just leave them off of our category pages entirely just to be sure. I'd noticed Yelp didn't mark them, but any idea why Home Advisor seems to do it? Maybe their code just automatically lists businesses with Schema throughout?

**Edit: **Is it okay because they've attached an itemprop="URL" link within the LocalBusiness tag on the business name, effectively attaching it to that URL only and separating it from the "category" page it's on?

Perhaps you can help with these more difficult questions (for me):

1. Do you have any idea about multiple reviewBody tags in the same main Review tag?

2. Is the itemReviewed tag necessary in the review markup or will the review being posted on the page of an already tagged business be enough? 2b. If it needs to be marked up, does it make the connection through Business Name only? 2c. I've seen the itemReviewed itemtype listed as .org/Thing as well. Does this make a difference?

Thanks again!

[David-Mihm]

I am just not sure why you'd focus at all on putting schema on the category pages if you're not going to get the markup benefit in the SERPs?

1. I don't have any idea about this.

2. I would just copy the format of a site that consistently gets the markup treatment in the SERPs, i.e. Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.

[kirmeliux]

The way our site is structured, it might pull the business data from one specific source. If we wrap our business NAP data in Schema, it might display that way on the category pages. As I linked above, Home Advisor uses Schema on category pages and I'm not sure why, so I thought I'd ask. It seems nobody is sure why.

1. Okay.

2. They're all using different things and getting different results. TripAdvisor uses RDFa, I believe, which doesn't exactly help me.

I guess I'll just have to play around with them and see which works best.