Marking up an iframe with reviews schema. Possible? Ethical?

[brettmandoes]

Hey there fellow Mozzers! I work with a broad variety of clients, many of them local businesses, and they in turn sometimes find a vendor that stumps me. This is one of those special cases, where the vendor is doing some shady stuff with reviews schema.

First, they're taking reviews from third party sites and filtering them to only show 4 and 5 star reviews (red flag #1), then they're asking us to post them to the website (red flag #2) and finally they are marking them up with schema (red flag #3).

If this were my vendor I would have fired them when they started telling me Google doesn't care, doesn't enforce the guidelines, and all that other nonsense, but hey, I'm not the client and I have to make good for them. I did flat out refuse to place these reviews as they asked, but they came back with a "solution", that I'm not sure I trust.

They're telling me they can't remove the schema (red flag #4), but they can iframe it onto the website. Their logic, which is wrong, is that Google can't/doesn't crawl iframes so therefore the reviews can be displayed without any negative consequence.

I obviously have some ethical concerns with this, but I have to provide the service to my client whether or not they share my values. However, I can object on professional grounds if I think they will take on undue risk. My only problem here is that I have no documentation for how this proposed solution would work. Working through this logically still leaves me with a gap, and that's where you folks come in! 
A) We know that Google crawls iframes
B) We know that Google can apply schema within iframes (works with YouTube embeds)
C) We know that content within an iframe is technically on another website, so it doesn't normally apply to your website
D) I don't know how specifically reviews schema would interact with an iframe
E) I don't know if this would result in Google triggering an alarm and blocking the business

I'm hoping you guys can help me figure this out. Ethics aside (making me cringe to type that) is this technically feasible without risk, or would this still be a risky move?

For the record, another client tried filtering their reviews while marking up with schema against my recommendation and got caught, and received a penalty alert. They were removed from results until the problem was fixed.

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[RuthBurrReedy]

I would say this is pretty risky. One barometer I have for penalty risk is "if a human quality reviewer looked at this, would they see something amiss?" and in this case, someone who knew what they were looking for would sniff this out as shady right away. I also think the combination of signals you're describing are easily machine-readable to an extent that a penalty trigger would definitely be possible.

I also don't understand the logic the vendor is using here. If Google can't crawl schema in an iframe, why include the schema at all? It's not like users are going to see it or get anything from it. There's no point in having schema if it's not machine-readable, so why do it at all?

James has a good point that reviews are actually more trustworthy when they include some negative ones. Users are smart enough, and used to reviews enough, at this point to be able to tell when they're only being shown the positive reviews - so including only 4- and 5-star reviews is probably hurting their credibility with customers, as well as with Google.

I don't have any data on how Google specifically treats markup within an iframe. I have heard that you are only at risk for a penalty if you're receiving the reviews rich snippet, so that's one thing I would look for - but again, if they're not trying to get reviews snippets, why do any of this in the first place? If they're a small enough business with low enough traffic, this is the kind of thing that could fly under Google's radar for a long time, but as you've already experienced, recovering from a penalty is a lot harder than never engaging in shady practices in the first place.

[brettmandoes]

Thank you, I have advised my coworkers and our client that we will not be implementing this solution as it stands on the website. I normally bring a lot of hard data with me when I need to fight back against something like this, but was a bit short this time around. I just may frame your description for assessing risk and hang it up over my desk. Cheers!