I run Meeple Mountain, a board game review website. Many of our articles are “reviews” of board games (a product). After some research I determined that the “Review” schema type was the most appropriate. However, I’m running into some trouble when vetting it against Google’s Rich Results test; getting an “Item does not support reviews” error.
I have the following questions.
Is this the correct schema type for a product review?
If yes, then am I missing some information which makes this valid?
I’m attaching a screenshot of the edit screen for the link I provided.
Thank you JS. I was under the impression that the schema was supposed to represent the content of the page, which in my case is a review (of a product). But from your comment, and the documentation you linked to, I think I need to change the schema type to Product, or even better, Game.
I know that I change the default schema for post types, but to test I changed the “Schema Type” to Game and tried it out. I don’t get any more errors, but neither does the Rich Results tool recognize that my content is a Review.
Don’t confuse the Schema type of your content, which would be a Review, and the SUBJECT of your review – i.e. the Schema type for WHAT you are reviewing.
Document SSO > Edit General > Schema Type = Review
You’re reviewing something, right? That is the subject of your review – Google wants to know what that subject is. It’s not a review, it’s the SUBJECT of your review.
Ahhh. No, I think that description is spot on. My only comment is that bit is buried in a submenu of a submenu. I found it, and in my case it’s set to “Review”. FYI it’s locked in this screenshot because this is my private staging environment.
This is under SSO > Advanced Settings > Document Types > Schema. Is this the correct place to change it for all reviews?
Aha, got it! Schema type is Review, subject schema type is Game.
I’ll have to remember how to map fields into the schema (author and game name) but this is now green. Thanks a lot JS, what a big help you and your software are.
Okay, I’ve got one last question here, and feel free to suggest I open a new thread, or point to a specific part of the documentation. I’ve got this working with a bit of manual effort, but the fields I’m editing seem to be good candidates for value mapping. I just can’t find it in the setup for the plugin.
Subject Schema Type – How would I default this value to “Game”?
Review Rating – This will need to be manually entered, but it’s also buried in a submenu. Is it possible to extract this field into a top level module for ease of entry,? I suppose I could write a quick plugin which allowed this to be done. I just wanted to check if this is already available.
Subject Name – I have a custom field which includes the desired name.
Subject Author Type – This will always be “Person”
Subject Author Name – This will always be the author of the article.
Schema Review is a sub-type of CreativeWork (see https://schema.org/Review), so you’re seeing CreativeWork and Review options in order – this is correct.
There is currently no supported custom field name for the review subject name, although that may be added in a future release. Note that reading custom fields is defined in the Advanced settings page, which is a Premium feature.
You can choose a default Schema type for the subject of a review, but that is located in the Schema Defaults metabox on the Advanced settings page, which is a Premium feature.
By using the same review subject author name – you would be saying that all games you review have been created by the same person. Although reviews can be for the same Schema type, like games or products, generally other properties vary, like the author, manufacturer, publisher, etc., so we have not coded specific default options for these. Are you saying that all games you review have been created by the same author?
js.
This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by JS Morisset.
JS, it appears that I do have Core Premium FWIW; at least according to my plugin manager (see below).
I found the default setting under Advanced Settings > Schema Defaults > Review > Default Subject Schema Type (and updated it to Game). I double checked in a review post type and it’s working as desired.
As for Review subject name, that would be a request from me. In my case I have a custom field which associates a board game with the review post. So being able to map that to the review would be nice.
Not all reviews are written by a single reviewer. But it would be nice if I could map the author of a review into the Subject Author Name field.
As you no doubt know, Google will invalidate the review if certain fields are empty. So all of these questions are focused on making it simpler for my writing team to add ratings. The fewer things they have to do manually, the more likely it will be that they do it correctly and completely.
Not all reviews are written by a single reviewer. But it would be nice if I could map the author of a review into the Subject Author Name field.
The review, and the subject of that review, are not the same. The subject author is the author of the SUBJECT of the review, NOT the review. So, in your case, the author of the game.
I _have_ the “author” of the game available, but in my case that’s not important to most people. They’ll just want the name of the game, and our rating. I did some testing in the Rich Results tool, and it appears that the minimum valid schema requires the rating, subject name (the game), subject schema type (defaults to game). I’ve got subject author type set to none, and that did the trick.
The Google search crawler and search engine is not “most people” – the information provided to Google is for Google, not people. If you have information that you can provide to Google in Schema markup, you probably should, as that helps Google understand your content and contextualize it with similar content on the web. This is why, for example, Google requires a globally unique ID for products in Schema markup – it’s for Google, not people.
Hrm, that’s a good point. But I’m trying to balance simplicity in entering this information, with its usefulness in improving our organic search traffic.
Now that I’ve got a handle on what is minimally required, I intend to write a script which will update old reviews with new information. Does WPSSO offer any custom WP CLI commands I could use to save this data? In the research I did earlier this week to retrieve the schema_review_rating_alt_name and schema_review_rating fields I noticed that both of them are stored in the wp_postmeta table under a key of _wpsso_meta. I’m not sure I feel comfortable editing that field directly, even via WPCLI, without a bit of guidance.
You could use the WordPress get/update_post_meta() functions, but those functions are buggy – better to use get/update_metadata() if you want to use WordPress functions (the WPSSO methods above are just wrappers for get/update_metadata() anyway).
