After enabling the TQW with Stars, this guide is designed to help SEO and engineering teams validate that the TQW with Stars is working correctly. This document offers guidelines and best practices to follow for testing the structured data on your website, and includes troubleshooting tips to help diagnose common issues.
Technical Guidelines For Using the TQW With Stars
Make sure your TQW reviews content is visible on the page when rendered and that it is not hidden behind any tabs or other user engagement features on the site. It should be immediately obvious (visible to human eyes) that the page has review content.
On the page where TQW with stars is enabled, you need to make sure the page is only talking about 1 product (whichever product the TQW is displaying reviews and ratings for). If you discuss more than one product on a page, you can not include this markup on that page.
For more technical guideline information (including the specific rules your content must follow in order to be eligible for rich results in Google search) read Google’s documentation and feel free to ask TrustRadius for any help in implementation.
How to Verify That Your TQW with Stars is Working
Using the Rich Results Testing Tool
Validate your page URL using the Rich Results Testing Tool. Go to https://search.google.com/test/rich-results and paste your URL into the tool when prompted.
If you have the TQW with Stars enabled correctly on your page you should see this SoftwareApplication type in the list of schema types on your URL.
Click on the SoftwareApplication type. If the TQW is enabled correctly on your page, you should see the ratings and reviews information here. You may see 2 warnings about the “offers” and “operatingSystem” fields not supplied by the TQW. This is expected and okay.
If you are able to complete all of the steps above, this is one indicator that your TQW is enabled and implemented correctly on your website. If you are not seeing stars show up in the search results on your page it may still be too early after you have turned on the stars feature on (best practice is to give it at least 48 hours to show up on its own) or you may be having a technical challenge which is resulting in the stars not showing up.
If you do see the correct code in the Rich Results Testing Tool, we recommend using the URL Inspection Tool mentioned in this article to give Googlebot a nudge to crawl your page to try to get the stars to show up faster.
If you do not see the correct code in the Rich Results Testing Tool and you’re sure the correct widget has the Google Stars Enabled toggled on in the TrustRadius vendor portal, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager at TrustRadius for more guidance.
Using the URL Inspection Tool
After TQW with Stars is enabled on your page(s), you can also use the URL Inspection tool to test how Google sees the page and, if desired, give Googlebot a nudge to recrawl the page(s) where you have placed the widget to get the stars feature to show up in search engine results page faster. In this tool, you can check that your page is accessible to Google and not blocked by robots, noindex, or login requirements. Go to your Google Search Console instance and use the URL Inspection Tool in the header. Submit the URL of the page(s) where you have TQW with stars enabled.
3. In order for the TrustRadius TQW to show stars correctly in SERPs, the URL will need to be indexed and have no errors. Double check that your coverage is “Submitted and Indexed” and that your page is showing as “Mobile friendly.” You can request reindexing here as well.
Why should you request reindexing? Right after you have enabled the TQW with Stars you can request reindexing to speed up the process of Google recrawling your page.
Google notes in their technical guidelines “Allow time for re-crawling and re-indexing. Remember that it may take several days after publishing a page for Google to find and crawl it.”
Using Rich Result Status Reports
After Google has indexed the page, look for errors and properly processed data using the applicable Rich result status reports in your Google Search Console. Ideally you should see an increase of rich results or structured data types and no increase in error rates. Monitor your error rates periodically using the applicable Rich result status reports, especially after releasing new templates or updating your code.
If you see your structured data being crawled without errors, update your sitemap to have Google crawl those pages regularly.
Look for “Review snippets” in your Google Search Console dashboard. You’ll see these rich results when you first log in and are on the Overview tab on the left hand side bar. If Google has picked up your TQW with stars structured data, you should see a line titled “Review snippets” below the graph in the Overview tab.
Click into that Review snippets tab. You should see a report that indicates how many of your pages have the Review structured data markup (which is the markup type supplied by the TQW). If you do not see this report, or the number of pages is too low, you can infer that your TQW was not enabled or implemented correctly. Feel free to contact TrustRadius for troubleshooting assistance.
One Important Reason Your TQW May Not Display Stars
Google does not guarantee that features that consume structured data will show up in search results. It is always at Google’s discretion whether or not they choose to show rich results in the form of stars on your pages with structured data. A couple of possible reasons why Google may choose not to grant you rich results stars might be your website’s age or authority. For a list of common reasons why Google may not show your content in a rich result, see the General Structured Data Guidelines.