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How-to Guide [Company Reviews]: Display rich snippets on your website
How-to Guide [Company Reviews]: Display rich snippets on your website

Learn what Rich Snippets are, how they help with SEO

Beth avatar
Written by Beth
Updated over a week ago

If you're looking on how to get rich snippets for your product reviews click here.

Rich Snippets are a powerful feature that can help you to display gold stars under your website URL in Google organic search results. This guide will walk you through how to get Rich Snippets to display on your site, how they help with SEO and our best practices. 

TrustSpot uses the latest Google guidelines for Rich Snippets by utilizing JSON-LD for reviews markup. You can read more about this guideline by Google here.

Important: On September 16, 2019, Google changed their rich snippet guidelines. Here’s some information about what this means for TrustSpot customers. 

  • Google has updated their system on Sept 16, 2019 to no longer allow Rich Snippets for company reviews on website pages, other then the review provider. 

  • Your star ratings for rich snippets (CR only) that display on your website will no longer show. However, rich snippets (CR) will still show on your profile page since that belongs to the trustspot domain. 

  • Google has made this update across their entire business, and thus TrustSpot along with any other 3rd-party review providers will no longer show rich snippets (for CR) on your website. 

  • Rich Snippets for Product Reviews still works fine, and is not affected by this Google change. 

NOTE: We have an FAQ section at the bottom which may be helpful to you.

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How to Implement Rich Snippets on Your Site

It's important to understand that Rich Snippets do not automatically appear on your site simply for signing up with TrustSpot. You will need to initialize the process by adding one of our Trust Elements to your website. 

TrustSpot is able to achieve rich snippets on your site through our library of "Trust Elements". Not all Trust Elements have Rich Snippets built-in because Google has strict requirements on what content is shown on the site that can achieve rich snippets acceptance. You can read all about Google's guidelines here

The following Trust Elements work with Rich Snippets: 

  • Trust Page

  • Trust Carousel   [we recommend the Block Design or Vertical Design]

  • Trust Blocks

This list is always evolving as Google makes further changes to their guidelines. 


To add a Trust Element to your site, simply visit the area within your TrustSpot account and select the element you'd like to use, in this example .. we will use the "Trust Carousel - Block Design. 

Now just copy & paste the code snippet onto your site. If you're unsure how to add it, we recommend contacting your Web Developer.
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Implementation Guidelines

The #1 best practice is to limit the amount of pages where this Trust Element is placed since Google doesn't like to see the same content posted everywhere. 

As a rule of thumb we recommend placing it on no more than 5 key pages, such as your: About Page, Testimonials Page, Landing Page, Services Page, FAQ or Contact. 

Placing it on your home page is fine, but Rich Snippets will not work for your homepage. This is a limitation / guideline from Google - it is not a limitation on TrustSpot's side. 

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Google Reindexing for your Website

Once you've added the Trust Element to your site, your rich snippets will not appear immediately. This is because Google needs to be able to scroll your site, see the new changes (ie: adding a trust element) and than update it's system so when people search your company - the rich snippets render correctly on search results. 

To do this, you will need to do the following: 

  1. Login to your Google Search Console, and select your website - than navigate to Crawl > Fetch as Google

  2. Input your Website URL than click "Fetch and Render"

  3. Check the "I'm not a robot" checkbox from Google and than select the radio button "Crawl only this URL" , than click GO

Repeat the above steps for all your URLs where you've added a Trust Element. 

Once your page is fully indexed by google, Rich Snippets should begin to appear in Google Search results. 

NOTE:    If your site currently has a low authority ranking it can take Google significant time to crawl your site unless you ask them (per the steps above). 

Best Practices for Implementation

By following our guidelines this will help you stand a good shot at Google showing your rich snippets in search results. 

Good Tips to follow:

  1. Add the Trust Element to a maximum of 5 key pages. Homepage is fine, but Rich Snippets will not render there (Google's rule).

  2. Place the Trust Element in a visible and clear position for your site visitors to see. This helps users immediately see your reviews to ensure you're a reputable company to work with. 

What NOT to do: 

  1. Do NOT place the Trust Element on every single page, as Google considers this to be spammy and may deter the likelyhood of showing Rich snippets on your website. 

NOTE:  Rich Snippets approval is completely up to Google. Even when TrustSpot has done everything it can and your site fit's their requirements, its still up to Google on whether or not they are shown in search results. 

FAQ

Can I add Rich Snippets to my home page? 

No, Google made a change to their Rich Snippets guidelines in 2016 that stopped stars from displaying on the home page. You can still show stars on your inner/sub pages. 

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Why are Rich Snippets only available on certain Trust Elements?

Due to Google's guidelines and restrictions only certain elements that show enough review content can have rich snippets show in search results. Their default guidelines include: 

  1. Overall review score and number of reviews must be clear. 

  2. Show the actual review content to back the score shown.

  3. Include a link to where users can click to go back and see all the reviews. 

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How long does it take for the Rich Snippets to display on my search results?

When you implement one of the Trust Elements marked above, follow our guidelines and submit the request to the Google search console, we typically see them being added in 6 - 8 weeks. 

There is not a "set timeframe" by Google, this is just an estimate from what we've seen with other customers achieve. 

If you happen to gain rich snippets, and than lose them, they should reappear with the next Google recrawl of your site - don't worry this is normal. 

NOTE: Rich Snippets approval is completely up to Google. Even when TrustSpot has done everything it can and your site fit's their requirements, its still up to Google on whether or not they are shown in search results.
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Why do my rich snippets only appear in Google but not in Bing?

This is likely because Bing does not support JSON-LD yet, which is what Google requires for their rich snippets to display properlly. 

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It's been X weeks, why aren't my rich snippets appearing in Google Search yet?

It can take anywhere from 6-8 weeks on average for Google to crawl your website where changes have been made and than pick up the rich snippets to display in search results.

Sometimes it can take several re-crawls before Google successfully picks up the page. It's also good to make sure you've followed our implementation guidelines and used the proper Trust Element.

Just give it a bit more time, try to do another recrawl and see where your site sits in a few weeks.

However as noted above: Rich Snippets approval is completely up to Google. Even when TrustSpot has done everything it can and your site fit's their requirements, its still up to Google on whether or not they are shown in search results. 

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Have a question or need support on this feature? 

Please contact our support team from here.

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