Rich Snippets on service pages and how to aggregate?

[dwallner]

Question about rich snippets..

I want to showcase reviews of the SERVICE's offered  but I am not sure if I should include them on the service page, a review page or both.  For example, we offer snow plowing and lawn care services and each service has its own page.  I have reviews for both services under the my "testimonials" page.   So, a couple questions.

1 - Should I pace a single review marked up on each service page?

2 - Does the review need to be a google review or can I use reviews from other sites?  If not, do I need to notate that somehow using the schema vocabulary?  Example, I have a 5 star review from thumbtrackDOTcom, is it ok to mark up the review and include a nofollow link? (No follow because thumbtrack is actually a competitor.)

3 - When I looked into creating an aggregate rich snippet I got confused / concerned.  Is it ok to list multiple services as a product?  Example:

<div< span="">itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"> <span< span="">itemprop="name">Lawn Care and Snow Removal</span<> <div< span="">itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
Rated <span< span=""> itemprop="ratingValue">4.5</span<>/5 
based on <span< span=""> itemprop="reviewCount">4</span<> customer reviews</div></div<></div<>

4 - When I tested the code above, no stars showed up in the preview.  Do I need to mark up products as well?  Am I doing it completely wrong

Thanks for any advice!!

[TakeshiYoung]

I don't think it makes sense to have star ratings on a testimonials page, the reviews should appear on the page about the product of service being reviewed, so all the reviews about Lawn Care should appear on your page about Lawn Care.

In general, what Google is looking for is reviews of your product that people have left on your site. Taking reviews from other sites and placing them on your site could be considered duplicate content (although Google themselves do this, go figure).

The semantic markup code you wrote above looks fine, just be sure to put a space where you put "itemscopeitemtype" (it should be "itemscope itemtype") and it should work properly.

[dwallner]

Thanks for the reply, Takeshi!

"In general, what Google is looking for is reviews of your product that people have left on your site. "

Interesting.   So even if I were to take a Google review and highlight as an achievement on my site, with a link back to the review on Google, it could be frowned upon?

So in order to implement rish snippets for reviews, as intended by Google, I need to setup a review system on my site?  I find that strange,   Who is monitoring the authenticity of the reviews, Me.. Great... Who is denying all reviews under 4 stars, me.

Seems to me a more ethical practice would be to link to reviews on 3rd party sites.  Sure, I can chose to only link to the positive, but at least its from a 3rd party site  and while there the user can see my other reviews.

"The semantic markup code you wrote above looks fine, just be sure to put a space where you put "itemscopeitemtype" (it should be "itemscope itemtype")"

Thanks, I will make that correction!