One SEO professional was concerned about Schema, namely, shop ratings. They wanted to know whether Google prefers product ratings or shop ratings for an e-commerce site.
Additionally, their other question was: would Google show shop ratings on category pages?
John answered that for shop ratings, Google does not try to show them if they’re on the shop themselves.
He explained in this fashion: if you have a directory of local businesses, putting ratings on those local businesses is just fine and to be expected.
However, placing a rating on your own website is not considered an objective rating.
Think of it this way: reviewing and rating someone else’s website on your own accord is an objective rating. But, reviewing your own website is not an objective rating and would be considered biased.
Because of this, reviewing your own website is not something that Google would want to show in their search results because there’s no way for that to be entirely accurate or objective.
However, if you have an e-commerce site, then John recommends using product ratings, because the individual products can then be reviewed by yourself.
In addition, you can also specify that these products are something that were reviewed by yourself.
If you’re really just a directory of e-commerce sites, this situation would lend itself well to having ratings on individual websites.
This happens at approximately the 34:32 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 34:32
I have a question about shop ratings. So schema.org organization aggregate markup- are they still relevant for Google search results? It seems to me that the overall organization rankings are not really in use. So as a regular retail shop, which rating should you prefer: product ratings or shop ratings? Would you show shop ratings on category pages?
John (Answer) 34:58
Good question. So I double checked just to make sure I get this right. In our documentation, in particular, when it comes to shop ratings, we would not try to show them if they’re on the shop themselves. So essentially, for local businesses, the idea is that if you have a kind of like a directory of local businesses, then putting ratings on those local businesses will be fine. And that’s something we might show in search.
But if you’re the local business yourself, then putting a rating on your own website is not really kind of like an objective rating, right? It’s like, I am five stars out of five, or 4.5, out of five to make it look a little bit more legitimate. But like, that’s not really something that we can trust and show in the search results.
So from that point of view, if you’re an e-commerce shop, then I would use product ratings, because the individual products can be reviewed either by yourself. You can clearly specify that as something reviewed by yourself. Or you can use aggregate ratings, which would be from users and show those there as well.
So that’s kind of what I would focus on there with an e-commerce site. On the other hand, if you’re really a directory of other e-commerce sites, then of course, having ratings on those individual sites would be an option.
