Google Confirms Review Stars’ Mysterious Disappearance In Search Results Was A Bug

Google review snippets are now back after a bug that caused them to drop out of much of the search results for about a week.

Chat with SearchBot

google-stars-reviews-rankings7-ss-1920

Earlier this week, we reported that the review stars began dropping out of the Google search results. Within 24 hours of that report, the review stars started showing up again in the Google search results.

This morning, in a Hangout, at the 56-minute mark, Google’s John Mueller confirmed they are coming back, and the reason they dropped out was a bug. Google said they fixed the bug, and the reviews should all come back soon.

Here is the Mozcast feature report tool showing us they are now back to normal in the search results:

mozcast-reviews-update

The reviews initially dropped out on February 16, then starting coming back a few days ago, after we reported the issue to Google.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.