Prevent Google from using review text as SERP snippet (keep aggregateRating)

  • Posts: 435
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  • Hikashop Business
1 week 13 hours ago #370858

Hi Nicolas,
Quick note: the text below has been drafted with the help of ChatGPT (I’m sending it so you can quickly understand the issue and what I’m asking for).

I’m working on the SEO of a HikaShop product page and I’ve noticed Google is using a customer review sentence as the SERP snippet description instead of the meta description.

Affected URL:
www.hermanosgaliano.es/comprar/cajas-con-ventana-transparente

What I’ve verified in Google Search Console:

The URL is indexed.

Declared canonical = Google-selected canonical.

The correct title and meta description are detected in the “crawled page”.

However, in Google’s snippet, the description text is taken verbatim from a review (e.g. “Without a doubt, these are the best…”). That review text exists in two places:

In the visible HTML comments block (the review content container).

In the JSON-LD ProductGroup under review[].reviewBody.

What I need (ideally in a supported way, without editing core files) is an option to prevent review text from being used as a SERP snippet, while keeping the rating rich results. Possible approaches:

A) Automatically add data-nosnippet to the HTML container that prints each review text (e.g. .hika_comment_listing_content), so Google won’t use those sentences to build the snippet, while keeping the reviews visible to users.

and/or

B) A HikaShop option to not output reviewBody in the JSON-LD (while keeping aggregateRating and reviewCount), or to output reviews without the free-text body (rating/author/date only), to reduce the chance Google selects review text for the snippet.

Goal:

Keep eligibility for rich results (price/stock/aggregate rating stars).

Only prevent Google from using customer review sentences as the snippet description, to keep messaging consistent with the meta description.

Is there an existing setting for this, or would you consider adding it to the reviews output / structured data generation?

Thank you,
José Ángel

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  • MODERATOR
1 week 9 hours ago #370859

Hi,

This is expected Google behavior. Google may choose to display any visible text from the page as the SERP snippet if it considers it more relevant to the user's search query, even when a meta description is set.

We've added the data-nosnippet attribute to the review text container and the shop's answer container in the vote listing template. This tells Google not to use the content of these elements as a SERP snippet, while keeping the review text fully visible to users and fully functional in the JSON-LD structured data (aggregateRating, reviewBody, etc.). Your rich results eligibility is not affected.
developers.google.com/search/docs/crawli...#data-nosnippet-attr

The fix is available in the updated 6.4.0 package. Please download and reinstall from your member area. If you have a view override of vote / listing, you will need to add data-nosnippet to the corresponding divs in your override as well.

Regarding removing reviewBody from JSON-LD: we don't recommend this. Google uses reviewBody to validate that reviews are legitimate and to display review snippets in rich results. Removing it could reduce your rich results eligibility.

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