Schema

Hi @wppraesenz,

Thank you for your topic!

We understand your point of view and why it might seem like a good idea to allow users to optionally enable product schema for reviews. However, we’ve made a deliberate decision to not include Rich Snippets support in the plugin and we’d love to explain why.

Since Google’s update in September 2019, Rich Snippets for review markup are no longer supported for LocalBusiness or Organization schema types, unless the reviews are published on third-party listing or aggregator websites (like Yelp, Facebook, etc.). Even if the correct schema markup is present, Google simply ignores it when it’s shown on a business’s own site. As a result, Google no longer shows review stars in search results for such cases.

Here is the link to the original post: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/making-review-rich-results-more-helpful.html

We’ve chosen not to include a workaround (such as using Product schema for Google reviews), because:

1. Google clearly discourages this approach, as Product schema is meant to describe specific items – not services or business profiles.
2. Using such workarounds may be flagged as “spammy structured data” (source doc https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/sd-policies#quality-guidelines), which can lead to a penalty or complete exclusion of the page (or whole site) from search results.
3. If this happens through our plugin, we risk serious reputational damage and potential disputes with clients – something we work hard to avoid.

Also, if we included a feature that we know won’t work as expected (due to Google restrictions), it would very likely result in numerous support requests from users asking why Rich Snippets are not showing. This would create more confusion and disappointment, rather than value.

In short, our priority is to protect our users from potential SEO risks and ensure the plugin is aligned with best practices recommended by Google.

We truly appreciate your understanding, and if you have any further questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Thanks!