/tech/ - Technical SEO

been cleaning up a mess for a local cafe all morning. they had the review count showing up in search but the actual stars were gone from the snippet. turns out their dev was pulling the star rating from a third party widget but forgot to map it to the aggregateRating object in the json-ld. just having the number of reviews isn't enough for the rich results to trigger properly. you need both the reviewCount and the explicit ratingValue.
>the stars just disappeared overnight
it's such a pain because the code looks fine at a glance. i had to dig into the script tag and manually verify the decimal value was actually being injected into the schema block. if the widget fails to load or returns a null, the whole property breaks. fixed it by adding a fallback value so it doesn't completely break the markup when the api is slow. now the snippet stays intact even if the widget lags.