Google Urges Sites: Stick to One Review Target
▼ Summary
– Google updated its documentation to clarify that reviews and ratings should have one clear target in structured data.
– This addresses a common schema mistake where multiple entities incorrectly share the same review or rating.
– Ambiguity often occurs with automated markup tools that attach ratings to multiple entities like products and businesses.
– Cleaner review-target relationships help Google interpret data accurately and reduce confusing signals.
– Website owners should test URLs in the Rich Results Test to ensure each review or rating has only one obvious target.
Google has refined its official guidance for review snippet structured data, advising webmasters to maintain a single, unambiguous target for each review or aggregate rating. This seemingly minor documentation update addresses a frequent schema markup error that can muddle Google’s understanding of content. When a single review or rating is incorrectly linked to multiple entities, it creates confusion for search algorithms, potentially diminishing the effectiveness of the structured data.
The core of the updated documentation is a clear directive: avoid assigning the same review or aggregate rating to several different items. Google wants a single, well-defined relationship between a review and the specific product, service, or business it describes. This precision ensures search engines can accurately parse and display review information in search results.
This type of ambiguity often arises from automated systems. Common culprits include website themes and plugins that might inadvertently link the same star rating to both a product and the overarching business entity. Another frequent issue occurs on complex pages where a single aggregate rating is mistakenly applied across multiple, distinct items. Sometimes, outdated JSON-LD code lingers on a page even after new, correct markup has been implemented. While these errors might not be visible to a visitor browsing the site, they create a tangled web in the structured data graph, with multiple paths leading to different review targets.
For any website that relies on review snippets for visibility, this clarification is significant. Establishing clean, one-to-one relationships between reviews and their targets helps Google interpret your data correctly and prevents sending mixed signals. This clarity can be crucial for maintaining the integrity and performance of rich results in search.
A straightforward way to check for this issue is to incorporate it into routine technical audits. By running important URLs through Google’s Rich Results Test, you can quickly identify if multiple entities are incorrectly sharing the same review or rating data. The solution is typically simple: the fix often involves removing redundant connections so that every review and rating points to one, and only one, clear target.
(Source: Search Engine Journal)
