Google star rating not showing in many sites’ meta descriptions between July 21st and July 27th affecting reporting data.
Google star rating in review snippets is an essential part of many websites, and it’s so much more than just a summary. It is people’s opinion of a service or product that is placed below the company’s name and helps potential customers decide whether to choose its services or not. Then, the average ratings are compiled and it is seen as one person’s honest opinion of what he or she thought about the product or service after using it for themselves.
This feature makes a site stand out among its competitors because not only do they present viewpoints with no bias whatsoever, but they also allow potential customers to see how many others liked whatever item is being reviewed too so the decision-making process becomes easier.
The technical problem consisted of Google star rating not showing. Some users detected this change and doubted if it was a new Google Search Console feature or a bug, but days after Google confirmed the reviews missing were a bug and corrected it.
Google Search Console, which is a free tool offered by Google, allows users to monitor, maintain and solve problems related to their website’s presence in the Google search engine. This service is useful to obtain feedback on how a site is viewed. It also offers alternatives to improve the overall ranking of the site by measuring its traffic and tracking keyword performance among other functions.
Google’s Past and Present
As you may know, when Google started running it only made a few updates to its algorithms each year. Nowadays, however, this search engine is constantly updating its algorithm many times a day! Most of these changes are hardly detected by users and -even most SEO experts– but on occasions, there are updates big enough for everyone in the industry to take note of.
Although Google is constantly changing and updating its algorithm, sometimes mistakes are made and as we said before, in this particular case, Search Engine Results Page’s reviews (SERP) went from appearing on half of the sites to appearing only in just 3% of them. This means that all of a sudden, the segment where businesses reviews are seen was missing and owners experienced problems in reporting data.
Some days after the incident, Google reported it in the section of “Data anomalies in Search Console”.
“Due to an internal issue, you may see a drop in your Review snippet and Product rich results performance during this period. We regret any problems this may have caused on your site”
-the report stated.
Although we may never know the cause of this incident, we do know that Google has solved the problem and the sites involved recovered their original features.
Keeping track of your business: Google tools that make your life easier
At this stage, it is important to mention that Google offers many valuable tools to uncover useful information about sites and their visitors. Within Google Webmasters Tools or GWT, people tend to recommend Google Search Console and Google analytics. Although they may seem similar, they serve two different functions.
Google Search Console provides users with information related to technical issues on their site or who is linking to it. Google Search Console is basically used to improve and optimize a site.
Instead, Google Analytics is a key tool for tracking the performance of a website. It provides data points about the performance of websites such as the number of visitors, the time spent on a site, where they come from and more related details.
At Global Wizards we help our clients solve SEO issues and improve their web pages attracting new customers. If you need to power up your business, contact us. We would love to hear from you!
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