E-commerce giants display star ratings on collection pages, defying Google

Image credit: Abondance

E-commerce companies are successfully displaying product star ratings directly on their search engine results pages (SERPs) for product collection pages, despite Google‘s official guidelines stating such rich snippets should only apply to individual items.

This widespread practice by major retailers like Decathlon, Lidl, Norauto, and Manomano demonstrates a divergence from Google’s documentation, which specifies that structured data for reviews should not be used for categories or lists of items.

Star ratings, known as rich snippets, are generated from structured data in JSON-LD format, which is embedded into web pages, according to digital agency Kalys. Google does not manually create these ratings.

Google’s official documentation explicitly states that review snippets are intended for specific products or services, not for broader categories or lists of products.

However, numerous large e-commerce platforms have found ways to integrate these ratings on their collection pages, enhancing their visibility in search results.

For individual product pages, structured data is often natively provided by e-commerce theme developers or managed by third-party review applications such as Loox, Judge.me, Yotpo, Stamped, and Skeepers.

These applications typically store product ratings within product metafields, which can then be used to generate the necessary structured data.

To implement structured data for collection pages, e-commerce sites can directly insert JSON-LD scripts into the page’s HTML description.

Alternatively, the structured data can be integrated into the website’s theme files, such as product-template.liquid or theme.liquid for Shopify stores.

This technical approach allows companies to aggregate and display ratings for multiple products on a single collection page, contradicting Google’s stated policy.

The success of these implementations suggests that Google’s algorithms are processing and displaying this structured data, even when it deviates from the guidelines for collection pages.

Companies like Le Site du Made in France and Speedway.fr are also among those reportedly utilizing this method to enhance their SERP presence.

Source: Abondance