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I have a website where I review a few local businesses. I have one page per business, where I present the business and explain my review.

My goal is to have rating stars shown in Google search results (based on my review).

Given that:

  • should my root type be a Review?
  • or should it be a LocalBusiness?

LocalBusiness seems to make sense because I have a lot of information about the business (prices, geoloc, etc.), but since it's not my business it might not be appropriate. Also there is this message in google's documentation:

We are currently piloting this feature with a small set of initial providers. We hope to open up the feature to more providers soon. Register your interest in our form.

So it seems stars will actually not work unless I register to some beta (my website is really small and in french, nothing that Google will really care about).

If Review works to show stars then that's enough for me. But if I use Review, can the itemReviewed be a Thing? If it's a LocalBusiness it seems I need to provide a lot of information that's not useful for the review. Google says:

You can supply ratings for the following content types:

  • Local businesses
  • Movies
  • Books
  • Music
  • Products

And also:

enter image description here

So reviewing a Thing might not be a good choice, but at the same time reviewing a LocalBusiness might not be good too:

enter image description here

(the last point does not fit with my website where I'm the one writing the reviews)

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  • I'm pretty sure Google doesn't show star rating except when there are multiple reviews and you supply an aggregate rating. It sounds like you could get into their "critic reviews" section or the "reviews snippet" section, but those don't show stars. See developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/reviews
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Sep 7, 2017 at 20:43

2 Answers 2

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You can nest a Review as part of the Local Business. You would need to wrap the review data in a Review schema inside the Local Business schema data.

Like the comment said, Google may not show the star rating.

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  • Yep I realize I can nest it, but my main goal is to show the stars :/ It seems hard to find canonical information about this it seems.
    – Matthieu Napoli
    Commented Sep 8, 2017 at 11:15
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For both of Google’s review features, critic reviews and review snippets, the documentation is the same regarding how the review(s) and the reviewed item should be linked:

Refer clearly to a specific product or service. Do this by nesting the review or ratings within the markup of another schema.org type—such as schema.org/Book or schema.org/LocalBusiness —or by using that schema.org typed element as a value for the itemReviewed property.

These would be the two mentioned ways for LocalBusiness and Review:

<div typeof="schema:LocalBusiness">
  <article property="schema:review" typeof="schema:Review">
  </article>
</div>

<article typeof="schema:Review">
  <div property="schema:itemReviewed" typeof="schema:LocalBusiness">
  </div>
</article>
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  • I don't understand, I've said exactly this in the question already. The thing is that if I do either these solutions the documentation seem to say that stars will not appear in google (see my notes in the question). My goal is to get stars to show up in google searches.
    – Matthieu Napoli
    Commented Sep 16, 2017 at 17:43
  • @MatthieuNapoli: With my examples, I answered the question in the title (not either-or, but both) and the bolded question in the text (both can be the root type). -- This is how the markup should look like accoding to Google’s documentation, now it’s up to them to decide whether they want to show stars or not (i.e., whether your pages qualify for a review snippet instead of a critic snippet). If your pages don’t qualify, there’s nothing you can do to "overcome" this, except for changing your site’s content.
    – unor
    Commented Sep 16, 2017 at 20:26
  • @MatthieuNapoli: About Google’s guidelines whether your pages might qualify: You quoted a part from the "Review Snippet guidelines" about "Local Businesses", but this part seems to apply only to aggregate ratings, which get displayed in Knowledge Cards. -- But again, even if it were the case that LocalBusiness reviews can’t get stars (which doesn’t seem to be the case, but let’s assume), then it can’t be a good idea to try to "game" Google’s parsers by marking it up so that they might not understand that it’s actually a local business which is getting reviewed.
    – unor
    Commented Sep 16, 2017 at 20:26

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