Google Structured Data Reviews - best practices saving SEO - review

I was implementing structured data in my companies website when i found this guide:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/sd-policies
well, there's a point that bothers me... "note that reviews or ratings not by actual users are considered spammy".
I found references like this or worst (seo penalization etc) about fake reviews. Well my question is how can google know if a review is fair or not?
We had our own review system where users can post and rate, we can take google reviews too (but it will be a blend of both sources).
Now i'm a little bit scared about how to deal with it as there's no information about how to make google ensure your reviews related content.
If i post our own reviews (as we're doing, because google is google and our website is our website), could google "ban" our structured data, or worst, penalize SEO positioning?
Appart from reviews itself, there's a property aggregateRating with the best and worst rates, the reviews count and the average. Could it be interpreted as fake or fair too?
There's little information about this details that at first sight it seems that we all would consider important from my point of view.
thanks

Related

How much, what order and where to put data?

I've been updating and moving my massage business website to Wordpress. During SEO process I interested and decided to include some structured data but I'm bit confused how to do it properly. I'm going to test that stuff first on my current site.
I'm going to present information with JSON-LD and I've been reading alot of schema-org manuals and blog posts about the schemas, still they are bit vaque to me.
How much data should I provide?
I still would like to present list of services we provide and price range by currency/min/maxPrice and persons data who are working there (name, profession, phone).
Would it be wise to put that data in the <head>-section of every page?
Or just specific data to page that they relate to like staff info to "Contact Us" page and service list to "Services" page?
Is there any penalty or down sides to have all that data on every page?
How do I present personal courses that every person has taken or other studies?
How do I present those services?
Can business under that HealthAndBeautyBusiness handle 3 phone numbers with names or should I just put contact info under person's data?
Does it matter in which order I present that data?
The more data you provide, the better
Better to be specific, otherwise it could be interpreted as spam. The structured data should be closely related to the content of the page itself
You mean the employees? You could use the employee property and the alumniOf properties but that doesn't match it very well. I think such data is a bit too detailed to be described at the moment - I would omit it for the time being
List them as offers, see makesOffer property
I would limit it to 1 number
The order doesn't matter
In the future try to split your questions, would be much easier to answer them that way.
I'm going to present information with JSON-LD and I've been reading alot of schema-org manuals and blog posts about the schemas, still they are bit vaque to me.
In regards to this statement. If I were you, and I'm not, therefore I can only assume you are just learning about technologies such as json-ld and how they relate to the bigger picture that is the Semantic Web also known as Web 3.0.
It sounds like you are on the right track I would suggest additionally reading articles relating to api's as well as the http request life cycle.
-Happy Coding

Do aggregateRatings need to reference where those ratings originate or do they need to be on the same page as the individual reviews?

While the actual code markup is pretty well explained, in Google developers docs, it is unclear where in a web page or on which pages the markup needs to occur and in what relation to the actual reviews that are aggregated.
For example, I see many pages around the web that are getting rich snippets with reviews, however when you visit the page, there are no visible reviews or indication of where those reviews are coming from. (Example Google search: radio connections Los Angeles )
I think this type of implementation may be against Google guidelines, but the guidelines are unclear. Do aggregateRatings need to reference where those ratings originate? Do they need to be on the same page as the individual reviews or ratings?
I'm talking in a strict 'white-hat' way, because it seems that to get the rich snippet in Google, the aggregateRatings do not actually need to reference or be connected anything and are essentially self-contained.
The Schema.org type AggregateRating doesn’t even offer a property to reference the single ratings, or to specify the source.
On top of that, not all aggregate ratings are based on ratings that are available online. Think of ratings collected per phone, paper etc.
Anyway, the guidelines for Google’s Reviews/Ratings Rich Snippets are only documenting in which cases Google Search would consider displaying this rich snippet for your page. If you don’t follow their guidelines (e.g., you don’t provide a property "required" by Google), the worst that happens is that no rich snippet is shown (leaving aside cases of intentional misleading or spamming). Google is just one of many Schema.org consumers, and there are plenty of useful Schema.org uses that don’t necessarily comply with one of Google’s Rich Snippets.
The vocabulary Schema.org does not require any properties.

Intranet site Content Management

I'm currently designing my very first Website for a small business Intranet (5 pages). Can anyone recommend the best way to manage content for the Company News section? I don't really want to get involved in day to day content updates so something that would be simple for the Marketing guy to create and upload a simple news article, perhaps created in MS Word, lets assume the author has no html skills.
I've read about Content Management systems but,
A. I won't get any funding for purchase and
B. Think it's a bit overkill for a small 5 page internal website.
It's been an unexpected hurdle in my plans, for something that I'd assumed would be a fairly common functionality I can't seem to find any definitive articles to suit my needs.
I'm open to suggestions (even if it's confirmation that a CMS is the only way to go).
Your requirements are : small site, no budget and the need for it to be easy for the marketing guy to upload a news item.
My recommendation would be to go with an all in one CMS e.g wordpress which has the kind of functionality you're talking about out of the box.
My guess is this organisation is just getting into "intranets" so something quick and simple that can be used to justify expenditure if value is returned is the key. Perhaps look at a plugin that automatically emails a summary of the blog posts to all employees once a week would be useful ?
There are many options and you can use any one of these:
Joomla
SilverStripe CMS
ModX
Cushy CMS
Frog CMS
Drupal
Additional in what Mr. Mckinnon said, you must keep in mind that if you don't want to get involved in daily updates of the people who is going to use the platform, you should consider the following:
What kind of data you want to be displayed
Who can view/modify that data
Who can create/remove data
How you will be organizing all that data
Your intranet should not be limited to display or create data, eventually all that data can turn into a beautiful Knowledge Base (KB) for your company that eventually your coworkers can share their solutions to common and rare problems that company can present eventually. This KB is amazing and time-saving, it is recommended to start it as soon as possible, so newcomers to your Company have access to it and see the most common issues and they can enter into production asap (we all know time is a luxury in every company regarding size).
Just keep in mind too, that all that knowledge and data is beyond valuable to you and your coworkers, so you should also consider some additional login credentials so your Company System Administrator can manage those credentials and also eventual audit for unauthorized access (if applicable).
I hope this helps from the administrative point of view

Geolocation APIs: SimpleGeo vs CityGrid vs PublicEarth vs Twitter vs Foursquare vs Loopt vs Fwix. How to retrieve venue/location information?

We need to display meta information (e.g, address, name) on our site for various venues like bars, restaurants, and theaters.
Ideally, users would type in the name of a venue, along with zip code, and we present the closest matches.
Which APIs have people used for similar geolocation purposes? What are the pros and cons of each?
Our basic research yielded a few options (listed in title and below). We're curious to hear how others have deployed these APIs and which ones are ultimately in use.
Fwix API: http://developers.fwix.com/
Zumigo
Does Facebook plan on offering a Places API eventually that could accomplish this?
Thanks!
Facebook Places is based on Factual. You can use Factual's API which is pretty good (and still free, I think?)
http://www.factual.com/topic/local
You can also use unauthenticated Foursquare as a straight places database. The data is of uneven quality since it's crowdsourced, but I find it generally good. It's free to a certain API limit, but I think the paid tier is negotiated.
https://developer.foursquare.com/
I briefly looked at Google Places but didn't like it because of all the restrictions on how you have to display results (Google wants their ad revenue).
It's been a long time since this question was asked but a quick update on answers for other people.
This post, right now at least, will not go into great detail about each service but merely lists them:
http://wiki.developer.factual.com/w/page/12298852/start
http://developer.yp.com
http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation
https://developer.foursquare.com/
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/
https://simplegeo.com/docs/api-endpoints/simplegeo-context
http://www.citygridmedia.com/developer/
http://fwix.com/developer_tools
http://localeze.com/
They each have their pros and cons (i.e. Google Places only allows 20 results per query, Foursquare and Facebook Places have semi-unreliable results) which can be explained a bit more in detail, although not entirely, in the following link. http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-each-Places-API
For my own project I ended up deciding to go with Factual's API since there are no restrictions on what you do with the data (one of the only ToS' that I've read in its entirety). Factual has a pretty reliable API, which as a user of the API you may update, modify, or flag rows of the data. Facebook Places bases their data on Factual's, just another fact to shed some perspective.
Hope I can be of help to any future searchers.
This is not a complete answer, because I havn't compared the given geolocation API, but there is also the Google Places API, which solves a similiar problem like the other APIs.
One thing about SimpleGeo: The Location API of SimpleGeo supports mainly US (and Canada?) based locations. The last time I checked, my home country Germany doesn't has many known locations.
Comparison between places data APIs is tough to keep up to date, with the fast past of the space, and with acquisitions like SimpleGeo and HyperPublic changing the landscape quickly.
So I'll just throw in CityGrids perspective as of February 2012. CityGrid provides 18M US places, allowing up to 10M requests per month for developers (publishers) at no charge.
You can search using a wide range of "what" and "where" (Cities, Neighborhoods, Zip Codes, Metro Areas, Addresses, Intersections) searches including latlong. We have rich data for each place including images, videos, reviews, offers, etc.
CityGrid also has a developer revenue sharing program where we'll pay you to display some places as well as large mobile and web advertising network.
You can also query Places via the CityGrid API using Factual, Foursquare and other places providers places and venue IDs. We aggregate data from several places data providers through our system.
Website: http://developer.citygridmedia.com/

Anyone have a link to a technical discussion of anything akin to the Facebook news feed system?

I'm looking for a presentation, PDF, blog post, or whitepaper discussing the technical details of how to filter down and display massive amounts of information for individual users in an intelligent (possibly machine learning) kind of way. I've had coworkers hear presentations on the Facebook news feed but I can't find anything published anywhere that goes into the dirty details. Searches seem to just turn up the controversy of the system. Maybe I'm not searching for the right keywords...
#AlexCuse I'm trying to build something similar to Facebook's system. I have large amounts of data and I need to filter it down to something manageable to present to the user. I cannot use another website due to the scale of what I've got to work at. Also I just want a technical discussion of how to implement it, not examples of people who have an implementation.
Are you looking for something along the lines of distributed pub/sub with content based filtering? If so, you may want to look into Siena and some of the associated papers such as Design and Evaluation of a Wide-Area Event Notification Service