Google Review Snippets Prohibits Fake or Undisclosed Incentivized Reviews

Google updated its review snippets structured data markup guidelines on Friday to provide a pretty obvious guideline that Google felt it needed to spell out. Google wrote, “Don’t include fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews on your page or in your structured data markup.”

Google even provided examples of “fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews” – they 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

Google said this update was made “to improve user review transparency.”

Nothing else on the page was changed as far as I can tell, outside of Google adding that new guidelines with those two examples. You can compare the live page to the older archived page.

This brings the structured data guidelines more inline with the Google Business Profiles guidelines.

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