Search hits with ratings reduced by 40%

In mid-September, Google announced changes to the way Rich Snippets are displayed. By tagging websites with structured data, website operators can create more than just the usual snippets of title, text and URL. Now, it seems, the changes are through.

The changes mainly affect search hits with star ratings, reports Sistrix in their German blog post.

Google has been putting a stop to the star rating Schema for about a month now and does not allow user ratings in the context of some Schema.org elements such as LocalBusiness or Organization. Since the Googlebot has to capture the pages first, the implementation took some time, but is now well recognizable in the SERPs.

Some of SNIP’s customers were affected, too. The recommendation is now to no longer use star ratings for the above schemas.