Pages - 3rd Party Reviews Schema Mark Up

Hey Team,

My client has Page Builder pages and right now we have a Yext Review widget on them that features first-party reviews. They have asked us to feature Google reviews (which is where most of their reviews live). I was able to add the aggregate publisher review information.

However, the client is asking me if instead of marking up our 1st party reviews with schema, we can mark up the 3rd party google reviews. The first-party reviews are showing up as snippets in the SERP but they aren’t as many 1st party reviews and they would rather feature google reviews.

Is this possible in any way? I know the widget schema is built in - so I can’t think of any other way to do this.

Is there a reason why we don’t facilitate this type of thing? I know that Google has you should not mark up 3rd party reviews with schema, but it looks like it works fine for this page in SERP:

Hey Jessie,

As you mentioned, Google has guidelines against marking up 3rd Party Reviews with schema for the LocalBusiness and Organization types. If you scroll down to the technical guidelines section, you’ll see the following:

“Sites must collect ratings information directly from users and not from other sites.”

You can also see the potential penalty for not complying with these guidelines on that page:

Warning: If your site violates one or more of these guidelines, then Google may take manual action against it.

As to comply with Google’s best practices, our widget does not support marking up third-party reviews with schema.

Best,
Jesse

Thank you Jesse!

Quick follow-up question - does your above note change if the schema type is not LocalBusiness or Organization type?

Based on the guidelines I linked, it appears to me that these restrictions only apply to the LocalBusiness and Organization types.

Is there a concrete use case which doesn’t use these schema types? Given that we only support reviews for location-like entity types today, I’m under the impression that all reviews in Yext today would only be for the aforementioned schema types.