Google drops Facebook review stars from search result

David Markovich, an Internet marketing consultant in New York has first noticed the change and raised the question on Twitter. As per his observation, Google is not showing the Facebook rating star in search engine result pages now. Many other webmasters have also experienced that Google has removed the Facebook rich snippets from the search result.

Facebook has grown as a king of social media platforms. People use Facebook for various promotional activities and search purpose. Dropping Facebook rich snippets from search result looks genuine, as it is very easy to get fake reviews on Facebook now. Businesses buy fake positive reviews to generate social proof and creditability. But if anyone can buy the reviews by paying few dollars that is not actually users will be pleased with. This could be the reason why Google has stopped showing Facebook page reviews in the search result. Another reason could be that users actually don’t care for the review stars when they search for the Facebook page. So, adding review stars to Facebook pages doesn’t make sense for Google.

Google has already a form to submit spammy rich snippets even though Google has also started penalizing websites showing spammy rich snippets. Paid untrusted Facebook reviews don’t fall under any of these conditions. This could be the reason Google has found shouting down the Facebook page reviews from search results from protecting search result from rich snippets spam.

There is no official confirmation from any of Facebook or Google regarding this topic. This also raises the possibility of this being nothing but a bug in Facebook rich snippet structure. We are yet to hear the official words on the matter. What do you think? Will it hurt business if Google has actually dropped the Facebook review stars from search result?

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