Rich snippet for testimonials and recommendations

Question

I have a project which will be using recommendations, not reviews. The only rich snippet that I can find that comes close is the Schema.org "review" but I don't have a "5 star" or anything like that to give it. These are plain text reviews.

Should I just fill in a 5 star since it's a recommendation and inform the poster that it will be displayed as such for ethical reasons or will I also run into problems with Google with having a site with nothing but 5 star reviews?

Answer 1

If your reviews don't have a rating, you shouldn't mark one up. According the the Schema.org FAQ there is no need to mark up every property:

Q: Do I have to mark up every property?
It is fine to mark up only some properties of an item - markup is not an all-or-nothing choice. However, marking up as much content as possible helps search engines use your information to present your page to users in the most useful way. As a general rule, you should mark up only the content that is visible to people who visit the web page and not content in hidden div's or other hidden page elements.

Giving everything a 5-star rating would be a misrepresentation of the content, and that would defeat the whole purpose of using structured data: to allow easier machine parsing of human content.