Review Schema Dropped Off A Cliff!?

[Virginia-Girtz]

Hello everyone,

I recently implemented some review schema for my website which looked to be successful as my review stars were appearing in organic rankings with no problem! Yay! However... I've just checked in on where we are with these and they have literally dropped off a cliff and I have no idea why.

See image attached with the graph that shows our reviews looking great in July/August then dropping off w/c 26th August. I literally have no idea why this has happened. The Schema Markup Tool shows no errors or issues with the markup either.

Can anyone advise?

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[MiriamEllis]

Hi Virginia,

Could you have done something to violate guidelines, like using schema markup on your website to mark up third party platform reviews or putting schema review markup on your homepage?

[NakulGoyal]

Have you also seen any impact in traffic during the same timeframe?

[Virginia-Girtz]

Hi Miriam,

Hmm maybe we have? I've put the schema markup on all pages - including the homepage - I couldn't see anything anywhere that said I couldn't do this? The platform that we have taken the reviews from has been from something called Checkatrade, but we don't reference that in the markup at all. We have the reviews dotted around the site and reference one or two on most landing pages, hence why we put the review markup across the site. We do have a testimonials section on our site which has more reviews on it, but these are added in via HTML as opposed to a widget pulling from the third party site (like the other dotted around the site). I can't see why this would be an issue though? Do I need to have links pointing back to the Checkatrade website for all reviews on the site for Google to validate my reviews?

Let me show you the markup and see if you can spot anything in there that I'm not seeing.

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[Virginia-Girtz]

Overall traffic hasn't dropped, but organic dropped on 29th July from peaking at 232 down to 108 visits per day - which is when the Schema seems to have suddenly disappeared. But I'm guessing the drop in organic is because of the drop of visibility on the review schema, so not sure that helps me figure out what is going.

[Virginia-Girtz]

Looking into the guidelines further, I'm wondering if it's because I don't link through to checkatrade in my reviews. The other issue I'm having is the product in question are conservatory roofs. These are not products you can review on an individual item basis, as it's just one product (in two colour variations) but we don't have these all listed on the website. Instead, the reviews are about our customer service, building work and overall product review. To make this easier, this is our website: https://www.greenspaceconservatories.co.uk/ you'll see that we have info pages about our product, but we don't have product reviews. Just service reviews. Is this potentially causing a problem as well?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Virginia,

Looks like, yes, there are problematic practices going on here. I'm not an expert schema diagnostician, but I can offer you two suggestion that I believe should help.

1. Read fully through this article on schema markup best practices: https://whitespark.ca/blog/how-to-use-aggregate-review-schema-to-get-stars-in-the-serps/

2. If you get lost, hire David Deering's company TouchPoint Digital - http://www.touchpointdigitalmarketing.com/ - for some consulting. He's an absolute expert and can help you get your schema into guideline compliance.

I hope these resources are useful to you!