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I have set up an aggregate review on my footer, pulling review data from eKomi.co.uk. When I pass this through the Google Structured Data tester it complains about there being an aggregate review, but no reviews.

The schema includes a 'sameAs' property which is a URL. Can I use this and point it to my store's eKomi page to make Google aware that this is where I am pulling my reviews from, and that this page contains all said reviews?

[Edit]

I pulling the review via file_get_contents then using DOMDocument to get the value of the review and the total number of reviewers. This information I am putting into a span for the aggregate review.

Instead of downloading, and creating mark-up for, hundreds of individual reviews, can I use the sameAs property for AggregateReview?

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  • (1) Do you mean ekomi-us.com (instead of ekomi.com)? (2) How are you "pulling" the review data? Client- or server-side? (3) Which type do you use for the "aggregate review"? – unor Jul 28 '14 at 15:55
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    @unor 1) I meant ekomi.co.uk; 2) Server-side; 3) Microdata: schema.org/AggregateRating – Richard Parnaby-King Jul 29 '14 at 10:25
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Google’s documentation of their Rich Snippet Aggregate Review still uses the Data-vocabulary.org vocabulary, but I think it’s safe to assume that this also applies to the Schema.org vocabulary.

There it says about count (which would probably be reviewCount in Schema.org):

Note: Whenever you include count, the page must also contain review markup for each reviewed item. count should only include reviews on your own site.

So if Google enforces this, there is no way to have this Google Rich Snippet when the reviews are on a different place.

As an alternative, you may use the ratingCount property (which gives the "total number of ratings" instead of "reviews").

(Note that all this only applies to Google’s Rich Snippets; using reviewCount in this way is totally fine from the Schema.org perspective.)

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  • I have implemented schema's aggregateRatings with ratingCount so that the rich-snippets show 4/5 - 400 reviews instead of 400 votes. The rich snippets currently work, I just want to get rid of the "error" message in the testing tool. What use is the sameAs property? How should it be used? – Richard Parnaby-King Jul 29 '14 at 12:54
  • @RichardParnaby-King: Ah, then it seems the SDTT is not in line with their Rich Snippet docs. -- Regarding sameAs: Only use this to link to other resources that are about (= identify) the thing the item is about. If you want to use it for AggregateRating, you may only link to resources that are about this very same aggregate rating. I know of no evidence that Google would use this property for anything. – unor Jul 29 '14 at 13:12

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