Google Expands Review Guidelines And Warns Of Manual Actions via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google updated their review snippet documentation to add three more reasons why a site may become eligible for a manual action. Authentic human insights are an important quality of the kind of content that Google wants to rank, arguably even more so when it comes to review content.

Three New Prohibitions On Review Content

Google’s newly updated guidelines on review snippet structured data are not directly related to structured data. They are more about the authenticity of content, which is why they’re listed under the Guidelines section that is about the kind of content that is eligible to be shown in reviews rich results.

The three changes to the guidelines are:

• “Don’t include fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews on your page or in your structured data markup. Examples include:
• Reviews that aren’t based on a genuine experience of a product or service
• Reviews written in exchange for a benefit (such as money, discounts, vouchers, or free products) that don’t clearly and prominently disclose the incentivization”

All three of the new guidelines are about the authenticity of published reviews and reflect Google’s overall concerns about expertise and helpfulness of content.

The associated changelog for the update explains the reasons for the update:

“Added a new review snippet guideline

What: Added a new guideline to the review snippet documentation about fake and undisclosed incentivized reviews.

Why: To improve user review transparency.”

Google’s Reviews System

Google’s concern about the quality of reviews is such that they have an entire algorithmic system devoted to reviews content.

Their Reviews System documentation explains what it does:

“The reviews system is designed to evaluate articles, blog posts, pages or similar first-party standalone content written with the purpose of providing a recommendation, giving an opinion, or providing analysis. It does not evaluate third-party reviews, such as those posted by users in the reviews section of a product or services page.”

It’s clear that the authenticity of content is an important quality to focus on as a way to satisfy Google’s guidelines, but more importantly, as a way to differentiate your content.