Review rich snippet with reviews hosted on customer feedback company's website?

[SEO-Bas]

Is it possible to enable rich snippets for reviews that are not visible on the page in question? A restaurant's Wordpress website mentions the average rating but the actual customer feedback and reviews are displayed on a page on the website of the feedback company. Would it be enough to implement a small widget (displays star rating, number of reviews and links to the review page) and add microdata/J-SON to convince search engines that the reviews are legit?

Thanks in advance!

Bas

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

No. According to Google:

• Make sure the review or ratings markup refers clearly to a specific product or service as shown in the examples above. Do this by nesting the review or ratings within the markup of another schema.org type — such as schema.org/Book or schema.org/LocalBusiness — or by using that schema.org typed element as a value for the itemReviewed property.

• 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.

In order for that particular page to appear with a review rich snippet, there has to be reviews on that page. If the reviews are in a widget, then the JSON should work fine if it speaks true to the reviews and isn't lying to crawlers (making your reviews seem better than they are).

You may be able to add the reviews JSON to the feedback page and add a "url": "http://www.yourdomain.com" to the code and have it appear that way. You're connecting the reviews to a business name and URL. Something to consider and test.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[SEO-Bas]

Thanks Patrick, this is really helpful!
I'll look into using the reviews in other ways, there's hundreds of them so it would be a shame to not use them to the fullest.

Thanks again,
Bas