The Review schema mistake that gets you a manual penalty

The Review schema mistake that gets you a manual penalty

The failure: slapping AggregateRating on your own product pages with star ratings you invented. Google's self-serving review policy is explicit — you cannot mark up reviews of your own services/products and expect rich results. Reviews of a third-party product are fine; reviews of YOUR business are not.

Where people get burned:
— Review-site owners put Review on the page itself (the article), Google reads it as the publisher rating itself
— Plugins like WP Review Pro and Schema Pro default to itemReviewed: WebPage, which is invalid for star eligibility

The fix: itemReviewed must be a real Product, Software­Application, or Service entity — the thing you're reviewing, with name + image. Author must be a Person, not your brand. Drop AggregateRating unless you have genuinely multiple distinct ratings.

Gotcha nobody mentions: even valid markup won't show stars for YMYL/finance/health pages — Google quietly suppresses them by category, so your 'broken schema' is sometimes working fine and just filtered.

Bottom line: mark up the product, not your page, and stop faking the aggregate.