Should we use "sameAs" to point to our own review page?

Question

We have various landing pages, on which we show an aggregate review (obviously with the hopes of it getting a rich star rating snippet on Google's results pages).

Since we do not display the reviews on the same page – we plan on using the sameAs property to point to the dedicated review page.

For example, landing page is: www.example.com/product
Dedicated review page is: www.example.com/reviews/product

Would using the sameAs property work? Or are we better off incorporating the actual reviews onto the landing page? This could be somewhat troublesome since we have hundreds of reviews.

Answer 1

On your main page, use AggregateRating to mark up the overall rating of the product. That, along with a plain link to your full reviews page with all reviews properly marked up, should be enough to give you the best chance at a rich snippet.

• If you don’t show the actual reviews on a given page, but are using aggregateRating schema, that page needs to clearly show the review score and link to the page where the reviews are visible

whitespark - Get Review Snippets in Google with aggregateRating Schema

Answer 2

In his Guide for Reviews => Review snippet guidelines, Google directly states:

Refer clearly to a specific product or service

and

Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page.

If you create structured data for the list, then check the following Google requirement for Multiple elements on a page:

A category page listing several different products (or recipes, videos, or any other type). Each entity should be marked up using the relevant schema.org type, such as schema.org/Product for product category pages. However, if one item is marked, all items should be marked. Also, unless this is a carousel page, the marked items should not link out to separate details pages.

In this case, you can use only one method for your markup, such as Single, all-in-one-page list. Please note that with this method you can only set links to the current web page using link anchors such as example.com/categoryZ.html#productA

The documentation of property sameAs tells us:

URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity

It is doubtful that a web page with reviews can be perceived as an identifier.

IMHO, create structured data for one product which is presented on one and separate web page. In this case, will be here a explicit connection can be expressed between the product being presented and a reviews for this product.