Schema, aggregate ratings and trustpilot

[eyephone]

Hi Patrick,

Thank you for your reply

It is the ratings from a third party app (called Trustpilot).
Every time a person makes a purchase on our site, they get an invitation to rate our business (webshop, products, service).

My site is an online webshop, and not a local business, so the info listed is metatags (RDFa's) from schema.org.
So basically, what I want to do is to include these ratings on my product pages.

Did that make sense?

[DirkC]

Hi,

The tagging seems to be on organisation level and looks ok on first sight (you can always check the tag inside WMT or using this tool . From your question I do not really understand where you add the product specific info. Normally they should be in two separate itemtypes: organisation / product (the one for the product should be without the aggregate rating - as this only exist for the organisation & not for the product).

You could check the example on https://schema.org/LocalBusiness (scroll to the bottom) for the tagging of your organisation. For the product - you could check the tagging on https://schema.org/Product (idem).

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[eyephone]

Hi Dirk

Thank you for you answer

The product-specific info would be in a separate markup, but on product-basis, as that info relates to that specific product:

and so on

The mark-up is working, according to Googles testing tool, so I guess my question is rather focused on, whether or not I'm following Google's guidelines, inserting aggregated ratings for the organization (collected through a third party app) on my product pages

/

[DirkC]

It is inline with Google policies as long as you add the rating to your organisation & not to an individual product.

If you check the different guidelines
(sources: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/policies & https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviews)

• When you have multiple entity types on a page, we recommend you mark up all entities on that page to help Google algorithms better understand and index your content  
  => OK -both organisation & product are being tagged
• Make sure the review or ratings markup refers clearly to a specific product or service as shown in the examples above
  => OK - aggregate reviews are done on item: organisation
• Review and rating markup should be used to provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items.
  => same as above
• Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page. It should be immediately obvious to users that the page has review or ratings content.
  => I imagine you put the rating quite visible on the page, you probably also provide a link to the original source (trustpilot)

Don't see any issue here.

rgds,

Dirk

[eyephone]

Thank you so much Dirk
That helps

Kind regards
Trine

[max.favilli]

In addition to all the good things said by others. Be careful about the following:

1. if you add AggregateRating markup for "ACME Inc." it will probably (as you may know google takes into account a variety of factors, not just the markup presence) show up, when people are querying for "ACME Inc.", but if your organization is "Potato and Tomato Inc.", and the user query is "Potato Tomato" won't show up.
2. don't confuse google guidelines for "Reviews" with "AggregateRating", you may have multiple reviews on the same page all nicely marked up, it's perfectly fine for google, but you may have only one AggregateRating markup per page.

Of course you can have AggregateRating plus additional schema.org markup on the same page, like reviews, but only one AggregateRating markup.

[eyephone]

Thank you!

I'm definitily using the aggegate rating, only, at the moment. If I'll include reviews at a later point, I will be sure to add an additional schema.

Question - can I use the aggregate rating for my organization on more than one of my (product) pages, as long as it is only one time per page?

[DirkC]

You can put in all your product pages. It seems a logical thing to do both for your company & and your users - a good score from a reliable source will reassure potential buyers that you're a serious company that can be trusted to buy stuff.

I am not sure if the aggregate rating will be displayed in the SERP's (most examples you see are ratings & reviews for individual products), but it will certainly do no harm.

rgds,

Dirk

[max.favilli]

I would expect product pages to have AggregateRating markup for that specific product. Not for the organization. Google is not going to show that rating anyway, so why put it there?

Keep in mind, you want star rating to appear in SERP because will improve CTR.

To have star rating appear in SERP you need markup and a user query matching the target of the rating.

Let's assume you sell vegetables and your organization name is "Veggie Inc".

Would you expect the product page for "Early Girl Tomato" to show up in SERP when people search for "Veggie Inc."? Unlikely. So if you add organization aggregate rating markup on that page no one will see that.

Do you think the star rating will appear on "Early Girl Tomato" page for other queries? No way.

Best practice is Organization AggregateRating on 1 page, usually the homepage, which people will likely search for using your brand as query, a query which will match your Organization name...

Hope I was clear.

[eyephone]

It is clear - however maybe not what I hoped for
On Trustpilot, it is our company's services AND products that are being rated, and not a specific product, necessarily.
So maybe in this case I should stick to one aggregate rating for the company.

I will however test it. By mistake I classified the aggregate rating on the product page with

instead of , and in Google, star ratings have appeared for this specific product. However, since this is not accurate, I have changed it to the "organization", and I will check if/when Google removes the star rating from the product page in SERP

[eyephone]

I will test it, Dirk, and get back to you. At the moment, we have star ratings for a specific product page in SERP. Today I've changed the classification from

toand I will keep an eye on what happens to the stars.

Thank you all for your help

[max.favilli]

That's a common cheating technique (Product schema in place of Organization), so far I never saw google spotting it.

[eyephone]

Okay, but I would just like to follow guidelines, in case Google spots it