The risks of adding review structured data to your Shopify store homepage

A customer asked if they could add review stars and review structured data on the homepage for a Shopify store.

Google guidelines around reviews are extremely strict, and they take them very seriously. Many websites have abused reviews in the past, and starting in 2018, Google started to crack down on them hard.

For Shopify stores, it’s nearly impossible to get review stars on the homepage unless you dedicate your homepage to selling one and only one product. A few customers have done that, but they had to customize their Shopify theme to get that to work, and had to make sure to follow all of Google’s guidelines. The only exception is if you qualify for Store Ratings, which is an entirely different process. 

Usually, when a domain has reviews on its homepage, they’re either:

1. classifying the reviews as business reviews, which Google doesn't allow anymore, or
2. using a loophole in Google by counting product reviews as business reviews and aggregating product reviews.

For #1, Google stopped allowing business reviews in structured data in September 2019, stating that

Self-serving reviews aren't allowed for LocalBusiness and Organization
Reviews that can be perceived as "self-serving" aren't in the best interest of users.

And if a domain is doing #2, they may see reviews showing up in search results and think they've won. It’s only a matter of time before they get caught, and intentionally manipulating search results is way worse.

Due to the level of risks with business reviews, many review apps stopped supporting business reviews and no longer include review structured data for them either.

Google's Review structured data documentation requires sites to follow their guidelines, and explicitly calls out that violating those guidelines can lead to a manual action.

Manual actions are when an actual person reviews the website and flags the site for violating Google's guidelines. Manual actions from Google mean that "some or all of that site will not be shown in Google Search".

In short, manual actions are really bad and could be detrimental to your marketing and sales efforts.

Like I said above, Google takes reviews very seriously because reviews have been abused.

This is also why JSON-LD for SEO doesn’t integrate or support any business reviews. It’s too risky and can jeopardize your search results.

With all the doom and gloom done, let’s end on a happy note.

If you collect product reviews, JSON-LD for SEO has integrations with nearly 30 different product review apps, and it uses them to safely add your product review data to your product’s search result pages. That’s the correct way to handle reviews and is fully endorsed by Google.

That can end up being a nice traffic and conversion boost to your organic search traffic.

Edit: There was some confusion with this article so I added some clarification which hopefully helps.