Hello,
I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?
Thank you.
Hello,
Thanks for getting in touch with us.
The preview of your review is added in accordance with the Google guidelines which suggest that a webmaster should show the schema to the users as well as to the bots.
Here is an article with the same information: https://www.ianbrodie.com/get-star-ratings-google-search-results/
If you show it to just the bots, you run the risk of getting removed from the rich snippets program. That is the reason it is being added to the frontend.
Although we do not recommend removing it from the frontend – Rank Math allows you to take full control of your SEO. You can follow this link to remove the Review Display from the frontend.
If you only want to show the star ratings and hide the featured image and description and only show the ratings, you can add the following code to the custom CSS section of your theme:
#rank-math-rich-snippet-wrapper .rank-math-review-image{
display:none;
}
#rank-math-rich-snippet-wrapper .rank-math-review-data{
display:none;
}
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hi Michael,
Thank you so much for sending the link, and instructions for disabling the image/description.
I followed the link and after reading the entire article could not find anything to suggest that the image and description need to be visible in the page. It’s possible I missed it- if so can you please can cite the relevant text?
However, that article did say:
Important note: Google recently updated their requirements for star ratings. They want the reviews that star ratings are based on to be visible on your website, not just taken from external sources like Yelp or Trustpilot or Google MyBusiness as previously recommended.
The article elaborates at length on how to allow users to submit their ratings on the page, in order to incorporate those ratings in the rich snippet.
If I’m reading that correctly, Google wants the ratings to be provided by users rather than the site owner. Is that accounted for somehow in the Rich Snippets area of the plugin?
Hello,
You can find Google’s official guidelines for reviews and other structured data here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/sd-policies
It mentions the following common mistake that prevents the Rich Snippet from showing in the SERPs:
The content referred to by the structured data is hidden from the user.
It also says this:
Don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page. For example, if the JSON-LD markup describes a performer, the HTML body should describe that same performer.
This is why we chose to display all the necessary information in Rank Math, but as my colleague mentioned, that can be customized with a little bit of code. Let us know if you need assistance with this.
As for your last question related to the source of the ratings: Google accepts two types of reviews/ratings, the first is where a site collects ratings about an item from its visitors (“AggregateRating”) and the second is where the author writes a review and provides a rating (“ReviewRating”). Rank Math supports the latter.
Hope that helps.
Thank you so much, this really clarifies a lot.
Just to make sure I understand, by “all the necessary information” – that means a title, description, image, and star rating? If I omit the title, description, and image from the rich snippet, but leave the star rating, wouldn’t Google just refer to the star rating as the rich snippet, and pull the rest of the information from whatever other information already appears on the page? I guess I still don’t understand why anything other than the star rating is necessary for the rich snippet.
Also, would using the display:none attribute described above run afoul of Google’s guidelines, by having info on the page that is not visible to the user? Or does it omit the information entirely, so that even Google’s bot can’t see it, and therefore it’s OK?
Thank you again for explaining this.
Hi,
If I omit the title, description, and image from the rich snippet, but leave the star rating, wouldn’t Google just refer to the star rating as the rich snippet, and pull the rest of the information from whatever other information already appears on the page?
Yes, if the content already appears somewhere else on the page, you can safely delete or hide those parts of the snippet.
To make sure Rank Math complies with Google’s guidelines, the snippet shows the same data for visitors as what appears in the source code for search engines.
Using the “display:none” CSS rule does not go against the guidelines: you are simply hiding some content that is already visible elsewhere on the page.
Hope that helps.
Thank you! It sounds like whatever info in the rich snippet needs to appear somewhere on the page, and as long as it does, it’s OK to use “display:none” to that info in the rich snippet.
It sounds like whatever info in the rich snippet needs to appear somewhere on the page, and as long as it does, it’s OK to use “display:none” to that info in the rich snippet.
Exactly, that is how it works, according to Google’s current guidelines.
