Google has updated its rules for how and when it shows the reviews rich results, the review stars, in the Google search results. In short, the new rules are there is now a defined set of schema types for review snippets, self-serving reviews aren’t allowed and name of the thing you are reviewing is required.

Supported Schema Types

Here are the specific defined sets of schema types that support review snippets:

schema.org/Bookschema.org/Courseschema.org/CreativeWorkSeasonschema.org/CreativeWorkSeriesschema.org/Episodeschema.org/Eventschema.org/Gameschema.org/HowToschema.org/LocalBusinessschema.org/MediaObjectschema.org/Movieschema.org/MusicPlaylistschema.org/MusicRecordingschema.org/Organizationschema.org/Product schema.org/Recipeschema.org/SoftwareApplication

Self-Serving reviews

There is a lot of confusion around this, Google wrote “Reviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” aren’t in the best interest of users. 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.”

Here are some of the Q&As from Google after posting this:

As an FYI, a year ago this was okay but things change.

Property name required

Finally, you must have the name of the item that’s being reviewed. Google said “with this update, the name property is now required, so you’ll want to make sure that you specify the name of the item that’s being reviewed.” Google updated the developer docs to make that name property required.

Forum discussion at Twitter and Local Search Forums.

Update: Google has had a lot of questions around this change and posted an FAQ. Here is the tweet with the details: