Today, Google announced plans to introduce algorithmic updates to reviews in rich results. Their stated purpose is to make review rich results more helpful.
Review snippet spam has been a big problem for some time. This has been a particularly thorny issue in legal SEO. While I welcome changes that make reviews more helpful and meaningful, I'm not sure that this update will make much of a difference.
According to the announcement, Google will limit the pool of schema types that can potentially trigger review rich results. For our purposes, their list does include local business and organization schema, as well as, their sub-types. This would include LegalService schema which is a sub-type of LocalBusiness.
Google says that reviews for LocalBusiness and Organization that can be perceived as "self-serving" aren't allowed:
We call reviews “self-serving” when a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A - either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget. That’s why, with this change, we’re not going to display review rich results anymore for the schema types LocalBusiness and Organization (and their subtypes) in cases when the entity being reviewed controls the reviews themselves.
I read this to mean that Google intends to cease showing rich review snippets for law firm websites that host their own reviews, regardless of whether they are first-party or third-party reviews.
At the time of writing, I am still seeing most "self-serving" reviews showing snippets. For example:
This is a tough one.
First, to my knowledge, the penalty for violating this guideline is that Google won't show rich snippets for these reviews. In other words, as penalties go, this is a "meh." Also, it's worth noting that Google is talking "algorithmic" update, not manual action. That might indicate that this means snippet removal only, as opposed to, rankings impact.
If true, it's probably worth rolling the dice and leaving the markup in place. However, if Google gets serious about combating these "self-serving" reviews, they may decide to take harsher action in the future. Who wants to be the guinea pig?
In my view, at the time of writing this, it's probably still worth the risk to keep the markup.
But don't rely solely on my opinion, follow along on the Google's New Announcement About Review Schema thread at Local Search Forum.
Instead of removing all the markup, I encourage you to consider adjusting your online review acquisition strategy. The short version is to prioritize earning reviews on platforms on which Google is currently showing review rich snippets. Further, prioritize those that appear prominently for searches on your name / firm name. Also, prioritize those that appear prominently for relevant category searches (i.e. practice are + city). Finally, I might abandon trying to obtain first-party reviews altogether. After all, you can syndicate third-party reviews on your site, just don't mark them up with review schema. So, if you use a review platform, like Gatherup, you might configure it to only encourage third-party reviews.
Anyway, this is a new announcement, so keep in mind that things may change. We'll work to stay on top of this situation. Have questions? Don't hesitate to ask!
UPDATE: Here's some audio if this post was confusing.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
