Home Page Rich Snippets: A (Word) Problem
Date: January 22, 2013Category: Author: Infinity Dental Web
The world of internet marketing sometimes feels like a difficult word problem. You can extract seemingly all of the raw data you need to solve the equation, then find yourself staring down at your scribbles and notations wondering “…now what?”. Well, the information Google gives to the general public (let’s be honest, they know its mostly for us SEO people) is pretty much just that. And just like a word problem on your math test in high school, when the crap hits the fan, it’s time to frantically guess and check.
I wrote an article back in November titled “5 Stars to Rule Them All”, (clearly I was excited about “The Hobbit”) to introduce our newest service which utilizes a modified reviews plugin to generate reviews marked up with Schema.org compliant micro-data. Since then I’ve done quite a bit of guessing and checking. Our goal was to generate those nifty gold review stars on the home page and reviews page snippets within Google search. However, despite what Google’s structured data tester was telling me, no variation of our markup on the home page would produce the stars as the data tester was telling me it should. However, it was picking up the the page with the reviews plugin itself and displaying the stars pretty much right away. At first I assumed it was because of the way the data was presented (a content slider) on the home page, but after rotating the slider to other internal pages, Google picked up on each of them and designated the desired reviews stars for the tested internal pages.
I’ve looked across the web for answers and experiences from others in my shoes to no avail. So, my current research has lead to met to believe two possibilities:
The first: Google refuses or is extremely strict regarding which sites can obtain the coveted gold stars on the snippet for your home page.
The more likely: Google paid a lot of money to acquire Zagat. They probably prefer the numeric ranking based on reviews pulled from your verified Google places/Google+ page and want this to be the only rating system on the snippet for your home page.
The Conclusion: Focus your reviews markup on high ranking pages other than your home page.
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