Google has made quite a few changes to its Schema guidelines for local business reviews. These guidelines suggest how local businesses can markup their reviews.
Google has also discontinued a few practices which were considered acceptable earlier, in addition to providing information about certain new rules.
Google suggests to include reviews that have been directly produced by the website, and to include reviews from third-party sites or syndicated reviews.
- Snippets must not be written or provided by the business or content provider unless they are genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews.
- Reviews must allow for customers to express both positive and negative sentiments. They may not be vetted by the business or restricted by the content provider based on the positive/negative sentiment of the review before submission to Google.
- Reviews cannot be template sentences built from data or automated metrics. For example, the following is not acceptable: "Based on X number of responses, on average people experienced X with this business."
- Reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other words, reviews for multiple-location businesses cannot be syndicated or applied to all business locations of the same company.
- Aggregators or content providers must have no commercial agreements paid or otherwise with businesses to provide reviews.
- Do not include reviews that are duplicate or similar reviews across many businesses or from different sources.
- Only include reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews from third- party sites or syndicated reviews.
