Yesterday we refactored our schema.org/Organization snippet that is found in the header of every page into a schema.org/HomeGoodsStore snippet with included testimonials for our company within it. Within 6 hours it was live, displaying beautifully. However, it's a bit un-nerving and we wanna make sure everything is nailed down correctly, the organization reviews (testimonials) can be assimilated to an area, and that product snippets/reviews do not collide.
A company style review snippet is found on things like social networks. Here is an example of what it looks like from Facebook:
And here is what our snippet looks like (truncated off 18 reviews in this example):
<script type="application/ld+json">{
"@context":"http://schema.org",
"@type":"HomeGoodsStore",
"name":"Our Store",
"legalName":"Our Company",
"url":"https://www.ourstore.com/",
"sameAs":"http://plus.google.com/99999999999999",
"logo":"https://www.ourstore.com/image/logo.png",
"photo":"https://www.ourstore.com/image/ourstore.png",
"description":"People give us money and we give them GLORIOUS PRODUCTS.",
"founder":"A Guy",
"foundingDate":"1789",
"currenciesAccepted":"USD",
"paymentAccepted":"Cash, Credit Card, & Paypal",
"priceRange":"$$",
"openingHours":"Mo-Fr 09:00-17:00",
"contactPoint":{
"@type":"ContactPoint",
"contactType":"Customer Service",
"telephone":"+1-888-888-8888",
"faxNumber":"+1-777-777-7777",
"contactOption":"TollFree",
"areaServed":"US",
"availableLanguage":"English",
"email":"mailto:[email protected]"
},
"address":{
"@type":"PostalAddress",
"name":"Our Store",
"streetAddress":"120 Main St",
"addressLocality":"Beverly Hills",
"addressRegion":"CA",
"postalCode":"90210",
"addressCountry":"United States"
},
"hasMap":{
"@type":"Map",
"url":"https://maps.google.com/maps?q=our+store"
},
"geo":{
"@type":"GeoCoordinates",
"latitude":"55.555555",
"longitude":"-66.666666"
},
"aggregateRating":{
"@type":"AggregateRating",
"ratingValue":5,
"reviewCount":"20"
},
"review":[
{
"@type":"Review",
"datePublished":"2016-01-13",
"name":"Awesome",
"reviewBody":"Thanks for being awesome",
"author":{
"@type":"Person",
"name":"Some Lady"
},
"itemReviewed":{
"@type":"Organization",
"name":"Our Store"
},
"reviewRating":{
"@type":"Rating",
"ratingValue":"5"
}
},
{
"@type":"Review",
"datePublished":"2015-11-02",
"name":"Neat",
"reviewBody":"You are great",
"author":{
"@type":"Person",
"name":"Some Dude"
},
"itemReviewed":{
"@type":"Organization",
"name":"Our Store"
},
"reviewRating":{
"@type":"Rating",
"ratingValue":"5"
}
}
]
}</script>
Is using Organization as the itemReviewed correct, or can/should we use HomeGoodsStore there instead to keep things specific? Im not sure if Review supports those new specific biz types yet or at all.
Regardless of that question, this seems to work. Lets use a category example, which is an area that has no "native reviews". As in, people don't review/rate the category, but the company owns the category, and the company has testimonials/reviews. So Google grabs the HomeGoodsStore and drops in reviews bar in SERP:
Those 20 reviews are on ourstore.com/testimonials, but in the header of categories (or everywhere) there is a star rater and link to that testimonials page so human understand whats going on. The testimonials page is also marked up. This doesn't seem like quite enough though for the bots to make the assimilation:
Is there a way we can use sameAs or some similar attrib/property in that schema snippet to point reviews to that testimonials page?
Next we have products. Google seems to be pretty smart here -- it prefers to display the product snippet data, and if there are product reviews, it will display those too instead of the company testimonials. This is where it gets a little scary and un-explored.
Are there any additional checks/balances/assimilations we should do here to make sure the product snippet is always "most powerful" when it's in the view like this?
Finally, we have a trifecta of data rolling between Our Schema, G Knowledge Graph, and G Merchant Center feeds. I believe this is how schema data is updating so fast (like in hours instead of months). Looking over merchant center docs I stumbled upon this: https://developers.google.com/merchant-review-feeds/. This seems perfect and seems like it could help assimilate/validate orginzation reviews a bit better:
A merchant is an XML definition that describes a single merchant. Each merchant should have basic information about the business, including the merchant's name and URL. Each merchant has a set of reviews.
But the question is, where/when/how do I supply this feed to Google? I don't see any options for "merchant reviews" in the "feed type" dropdown when adding a new feed in https://merchants.google.com.
