Goodbye Review Rich Results for article and blog posts

While investigating Google’s new Rich Results rules in their latest algorithm update I noticed something omitted.

Specifically, we’ll only display reviews with those types (and their respective subtypes)

 

Followed by a big list of data types that are allowed to have Review Rich Results.

But Article and BlogPosting are no longer listed.

In the past you could accept reviews and ratings from readers and use those reviews to enhance your Article Rich Results but it seems like they have been removed in this algorithm update.

JSON-LD for SEO itself only supported one review app for Articles, mostly because they were the only Shopify app who worked with articles. Everyone else is only focused on businesses (which were hit hard too) or products.

My plan is to keep that integration for the other search engines, especially since Google will just ignore that data.

Expect to hear more about this algorithm change over the next few weeks. Every time I start to research one aspect of it, I undercover more and more.

This is definitely one of Google’s big structured data updates for 2019. At least this time it didn’t come out in the middle of December.

The good news is that JSON-LD for SEO and its data has always been the highest quality possible so this algorithm update doesn’t appear to have an impact on customers, at least to the core Product Rich Results.

Though I am seeing signs of other Shopify apps getting hit so stay tuned while I dig (does "stay tuned" even make sense saying in email? "Breaking news at 7am or whenever you get this email…")

If you haven’t installed JSON-LD for SEO yet, you should seriously consider it now.

With this algorithm update you could be losing your Rich Results if your Shopify theme is older or hasn’t updated its structured data (hint: many of them are years behind).

And losing Rich Results right before the Q4 holidays could make for some lean SEO this busy season.