Are Review Dates Necessary in Schema markup for Ratings to Appear in SERPS?

[schmeetz]

Schema seems to be properly set up according to Google Webmaster Tools and the Structured Data Testing Tool... https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/?url=http://www.myessentia.com/mattresses/classic-8

Are dates for reviews necessary to getting the star ratings to appear in the SERPS?

[DmitriiK]

Hi.

I had pretty excruciating experience with Schema. I've been working with it for some time, but i rarely seen it work. I have seen it work for ecommerce websites, but that's pretty much it. I know it's all correct, at least according to structured data checker tool and common sense, but it's still painfully rare when it actually displays rich snippets. Also, usually it does take looong time to see results. You said it's been three months, usually it should be enough, but who knows how Google works.

Also there is a clear explanation that Google uses schema as a referrer, as a helper, but it doesn't necessarily mean that if you have schema, you gonna have snippet. I even had a phone-talk with Google engineers about our "perfectly" proper schema for Knowledge Graph, which isn't working. For about 4 months. Nobody could give me any make-sense answer.

If you do figure it out, please, let community now

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Schmeetz,

I've had a rough time getting reviews to work for schema as well. The structured data testing tool can give you a positive when something's actually missing that'll stop Google from displaying your stars. The nice thing is, if you're using structured data, Google will update their listings as soon as they recrawl the page, so you can test things fairly easily. Use Google Webmaster Tools to "Fetch as Google" and "Submit to Index" to get a page with new code recrawled within an hour or so.

I don't think you need dates in order to get star ratings on SERPs. I haven't needed them on my company's site. But, I noticed that all of your markup is using content tags rather than marking up actual content on the page. My guess is, that's the issue, that Google doesn't trust content that isn't seen on the page. Have you tried marking up the actual content?

_Note: _Google will also sometimes blacklist domains from displaying reviews. This isn't an issue for you, but for others reading this: you can test it by searching for "site: [product URL]". If Google displays the ratings then, it's not a technical issue, it's a blacklisting issue.

Test out marking up visible HTML text and let us know how it goes!

Best,

Kristina