Schema.org snippet for thumbs up-down reviews

[ShaqD]

Hi guys,

I'm deep into the Schema.org meta-tags implementation for the reviews on my website and I'd love to know how do you think I should implement it when I have Positive-Negative reviews as opposed to star ratings.  I couldn't find a site that had this with schema tags for reference.  Fiverr used to have thumbs up/down, but recently changed to star rating.

On our services marketplace we allow users to review the providers they worked with and ask them for a positive-negative review - thumbs up/down with an additional open text area.

I thought about adding a schema.org meta-tags like this:

Lets assume one of our providers got two reviews, one is positive and the second is negative. So, first I thought about adding an aggregateReview meta-tag on top, just like this:

And also add a meta-tag for any review, like this:

Two days ago by
    Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
    Joe is a great guy, I'd recommend him to my friends.

Does that make sense?

Has anyone had the chance to implement a schema.org meta tags for this kind of situation or familiar with a website who does it that way?

Thanks so much for your help!

Shaqd

[Ray-pp]

Hi Shaqd,

I have not personally implemented a thumbs up/down rating system, but have implemented a 5 star rating system.

Since your rating only have two values, either 1 or 2 (1 being thumbs down, 2 being thumbs up), you'll need to specify the Bestrating attribute so Google understands you only have two options.

This is because, by default, Google assumes a 5 star rating system (1-5) if the attribute is not specified.

On this page: http://schema.org/Rating you'll see how to add the bestrating attribute (bestRating)

It would be great if someone could give an example of how that looks in the SERPs too.

[ShaqD]

Thanks Ray-pp for the quick and helpful response.

It might be a good idea to add bestRating/worstRating tags to each Review (I'm thinking whether it should be a 0/1 or 1/2 like you suggested). The thing is I need also to add an aggregateReview meta tag in addition to the reviews.

What do you think should be the values for the aggregateReview meta tags reviewCount and reviewValue than?

[Everett]

I would put the scale at 0-1. The choice is binary: on or off, good or bad, thumbs up or thumbs down. If you used 1-2 even a bad review would increase the score so the worst Item could end up having the highest rating on the site if enough people voted.

I haven't implemented thumbs up or thumbs down, but I have bent the use to match the way I present data on a site. The site I did this on does have star ratings in the SERPs, which use the aggregate rating of two or more star ratings/reviews. This is pretty standard, but my problem was that I was comparing two or more totally different products, and I'm sure the aggregate rating is meant to apply only to multiple reviews of the same thing. However, that was the only way to get the stars (unless I missed something, and I hope I did) so that's what I did.

All of that is to say, don't be afraid to try it out and see what happens. You're not going to get penalized for poorly implemented schema. Unless you are grossly and obviously trying to spam Google the worst that is going to happen is you don't get the snippet in the SERPs. The problem is even if everything is perfect, that doesn't guarantee Google will display them.

[ShaqD]

Everett, I think you're right. Since I didn't find a place to get inspiration from I will try it out in the way I mentioned above with a scale of 0-1 for every review.

Btw, I'm not sure you guys noticed, but this forum includes thumbs up/down rating system.Unfortunately, they didn't implement the schema.org tags

Thanks a million.

ShaqD

[Everett]

LOL, well you know the Moz folks. If they bent the rules just a bit they'd have a thousand haters calling them out on it publicly by the end of the day. So they tend toward sticking with legitimate best practices and unfortunately there is no such thing at the moment that I can find for "thumbs up or down" but I think a scale of 0-1 is definitely appropriate and will bring this up to the powers that be.

Thanks!

[ShaqD]

Well, I decided to go with the approach we discussed earlier. After I pushed the changes to our live environment and tested it on Google Structured Data Testing Tool, I found a really weird (and very generic) error: "Error: Incomplete microdata with schema.org."

Any idea what could be the issue here?

Results:

Item
  type: http://schema.org/review
  property:
    reviewrating: Item 1
    datepublished: 2014-07-25
    author: Massim L.
    reviewbody: This is the great job made by X. You know what? I will have remix some of my previous songs too... he's so good!!!

Error: Incomplete microdata with schema.org.

Item 1
  type: http://schema.org/rating
  property:
    ratingvalue: 1
    worstrating: 0
    bestrating: 1

Thanks.

ShaqD

[Everett]

Hello ShaqD,

I had a look at the code and it looks good to me, but I'm not a developer by trade. Perhaps a developer could be of more assistance.

One thing I did notice was that you have several different schemas on that page, such as one for "website" and one for "pharmacy". Is it possible that one of those is responsible for the error, or were they already on the page the last time you tested the site live without errors using the structured data testing tool?

[ShaqD]

Thanks Everett for your help.

The HTML code is ok, you're right. It's something with how we configured the Schema.org tags.

Btw, where did you see the several different schemas?

ShaqD

[Everett]

I'm pretty sure it was on the product page you messaged about. Not that there is anything wrong with marking up several things on a page, but I'm just saying perhaps one of those other areas (e.g. pharmacy) is where the incomplete markup is instead of the product markup.