Site owners can control the information provided to social and search sites, but they cannot control how that information is displayed on those sites — Google will show rating and review values in search results as they wish, based on the information collected from your site. See here for more info: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review-snippet
js.
Hi js, many thanks for your prompt reply.
My apologies for being unclear. I understand that Google will pick and choose what it wants to display, but I’m looking to at least be able to provide as much info as possible to help Google get the right info, which our current combination of WP theme and Yoast doesn’t do.
Based on that link you helpfully provided, I think the particular schema fields I’m looking for are AggregateRating, ratingCount and/or reviewCount, so I can enter the number of ratings and reviews (not all of our reviews have ratings) that have contributed to the aggregated rating score.
Is this available on either your free or premium plugins?
Thank you again.
If your customers have entered a rating for your product (ie. a rating / review for the webpage content), then you must be using a plugin for this as WordPress does not offer a rating feature by default. Which plugin are you using? If you’re not using a plugin yet, then you’d probably want to look at https://ww.wp.xz.cn/plugins/wpsso-ratings-and-reviews/, which extends the WordPress comment system. WPSSO Core and the WPSSO JSON add-on will use the ratings and reviews provided by the WPSSO RAR add-on. Alternatively, if you use the WooCommerce plugin, which includes a native product rating features, you simply need the WPSSO Core Premium plugin (which includes integration modules for many plugins and service APIs, like WooCommerce).
js.
This may be where I’m struggling.
We use a custom plugin to import third-party reviews from a database, but we use our theme functionality (Newspaper by tagDiv) to create an overall rating amd review summary.
I have the WPSSO RAR add-on installed, but that only seems to allow for user ratings, whereas our site manually curates expert reviews from a range of motoring websites and aggregates them into an overall score – like Rotten Tomatoes does for movies.
stuart
Google likes to see the ratings and reviews in the webpage, not just in the markup. You can always use a filter like this one to customize the rating and review count, but Google may not give it much weight since the individual reviews will not be in the markup or in the webpage.
https://wpsso.com/docs/plugins/wpsso-schema-json-ld/notes/developer/filters/examples/modify-the-aggregaterating-property/
js.
Thanks for that guidance, I’ll see if we can get that implemented.
We do display all of the reviews and ratings that we use on each page, including backlinks to each review, so we’re certainly trying to do the right thing by both Google and the original sources.
(example here: https://staging.thecarexpert.co.uk/mitsubishi-mirage-2013/ )
We’ll go ahead and purchase the premium core plugin and add-ones we need. Many thanks for all your help, much appreciated. Have a great weekend.
stuart
Ah, I see. You’d want to use the https://schema.org/Review type for that content, and you’d need to get the WPSSO JSON Premium add-on to customize the subject of that review in the Document SSO metabox. The https://schema.org/associatedReview property would be useful in this context, to include those additional “Media reviews”, but there’s no elegant way to offer that kind of functionality in the Document SSO metabox – adding related reviews would have to be done by a custom filter. If those “Media reviews” are available in a predictable way (custom fields, associated post taxonomy, etc.), then a custom filter may be worth creating to add those related reviews automatically. We offer custom development services, on occasion, so that could be one way to go (contact us here https://surniaulula.com/support/ if that’s something you would be interested in).
js.
