Google Looking Into Review Stars Dropping Out Of The Search Results

Last week, Google began removing the review stars from the search results. We asked Google if this is a bug or intentional.

Chat with SearchBot

google-stars-reviews-rankings3-ss-1920

Last week, webmasters began noticing huge drops in reviews and review stars showing up in the Google search results. In fact, the Mozcast SERP Feature Graph shows the decline, from showing up in about 35 percent of the queries to 22 percent of the queries in the past several days.

Here is the graph from Moz:

mozcast-reviews

We asked Google about this last week, and Google told us today that “we’re looking into it and will let you know when we have more details.”

It is hard to say if Google intentionally removed the review stars from the search results. But a huge percentage of the queries Moz tracks show a significant decline in review snippets, so this seems like a bug to me, but Google will hopefully get back to us soon with more details.

The important thing to note is that if your review stars are missing in the search results, you are not alone.

Postscript: After reporting this to Google, it seems a day later the reviews are beginning to return to the search results. We are guessing this was a bug, although Google did not give us any statement confirming a bug or not.


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.