Multiple reviews without aggregaterating object
- Thread starter Akilan
- Start date
It wants an overall average star rating out of five across all the reviews.
I have the same problem on a couple of sites. We started collecting customer comments about 15 years ago, without realizing how important a rating out of 5 stars would become, so have not been asking people for this. When Google introduced 'structured markup', we diligently marked up these comments accordingly as reviews. But we simply don't have the data Google now wants, because we did not ask for it at the time.
I am half-tempted to go through the comments and assign star-ratings based on how positive they sound, obviously erring on the positive side, but that strikes me as being a bit dodgy. I suspect that simply providing a made-up overall aggregate would not work, as Google would then complain it does not tally with the ratings (or lack of) for individual reviews.
The upshot really is that in future we must always ask for a rating out of five stars, because that's what Google wants us to do, and our hands are tied. The benefit of doing so would be that in future, in some SERPs, gold stars would appear, enticing searchers in.