Added the Review rich snippet and rankings have dropped?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hi Mozzers,

I am really surprised what happened here. I conducted a small campaign by adding reviews rich snippet to 10 different microsites(covering different locations). Today I was checking if the snippets were showing up correctly in the SERPs and noticed that most of these locations with review snippet dropped in the rankings?

How weird is that?

Can anyone explain what happened here?

Has anyone experienced this?

Thank you!

[TakeshiYoung]

How long ago was this, and over what time period are you looking at rankings?

Unless you were previously doing something deceptive, my guess is that the rankings drops have nothing to do with the rich snippets. Google's algo changes all the time, and rankings fluctuate all the time. It's easy to try to draw some kind of cause & effect relationship here, but likely the results have nothing to do with the rich snippet code (assuming you implemented it correctly).

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Taysir,

I agree with Takeshi that it's unlikely that adding rich snippets could cause a ranking drop. I'll add two provisos to this here, however. Is it possible that:

1. You are duplicating testimonials across all these microsites? In other words, using a testimonial on more than one website, thus creating a duplicate content issue?

2. You are re-publishing third party reviews (gained from places like your Google+ Local page) on the website as rich snippet-encoded testimonial? This isn't allowed.

Either of these practices could harm your rankings, but if you've correctly implemented rich snippets in a non-duplicating manner, then I can't imagine any way in which these would have caused your rankings to drop. I want to let you know that, right now, there are MAJOR changes going on in Google's Local results - a big shakeup of some kind, likely with more changes to come. It could be that your sites are getting bounced around in the process. If you feel all of the practices you are using are allowed, I'd hang on for a couple of weeks before I got really worried, and wait to see what happens.

Regarding the shakeup, you might want to read:

http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/11705-google-local-serp-update-old-pack-algo.html

I recommend that you read the whole long thread as it contains many discoveries and conjectures that anyone in Local should be up on right now.

Hope this helps!

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hi guys,

Thank you for your great responses! It is actually what I was thinking, nothing to do with the implementation of rich snippet but because Miriam mentioned that you're not supposed to take reviews from third parties then I am little concerned about this. So my question is then where are you supposed to take them from? What is the purpose of the review rich snippet then?

I actually took those reviews from Customer lobby and they aren't duplicating anywhere!

@Takeshi: The implementation of the rich snippets were made last week and checked the rankings around the same time.

Thanks!