Schema markup abuse for ratings

[DarrenX]

A competitor recently jumped very high in the SERPS after adding Ratings markup schema to his site. His site shows in the serps with a 5 star rating for a software product.

Here's his site: http://bit.ly/11hp2KX

The source of the "rating" appears just to be hard coded schema markup, not connected to anything external or impartial.It appears at this point that Google is taking this markup data at face value, and maybe is giving it some authorityHave you seen this kind of abuse in your vertical?

[KevinBudzynski]

I have not seen anything like this (could not get the link to work though). Seems odd that Google would take this at face-value even though it appears to. Seems like a great way to exploit the system in the short-term, but most likely backfire soon afterwards.

[Branagan]

The link doesn't work for me either, but if as you say the markup is hard-coded (not real users voting), I did see it a while ago, the boost lasted around two weeks, then as Kevin points out it backfired (site got penalized) and they removed it, although it wasn't probably the only reason since they were implementing many other 'tricks' at the time.

[DarrenX]

Link wasn't hot, but I fixed that. It's working for me now. Thanks for your comments.

[Branagan]

Yes, you can't actually vote for the product, they just include hReview-aggregate which is intended to show an average of user votes, but since there's no implementation of a voting system it seems they're just filling out the blanks by themselves..very similar to what I saw in this other site I was telling you about.

[DarrenX]

Ok, thanks. That's what I thought. I'll file a webspam report and see what happens. Won't hold my breath though.   Not the first tricky thing these guys have done, and won't be the last I'm sure.

[WilliamCarr]

I've had good luck filing a webspam report through Chrome rather than WMT. Might be worth a try.