Last week we saw a sharp decline in the number of search results displaying the review stars rich snippets.  Mozcast reported stars dropped from about 30% of search results down to 20%.  However, a couple of days ago we saw those numbers start to jump up again.  And now John Mueller has confirmed it was actually a bug.

Here is the Mozcast tracking for review stars.

Here is what John said in today’s webmaster office hours:

This has come up in a few instances where the review stars are shown less frequently.  And we double checked that with the team on that actually, just to make sure because usually it’s kind of normal that the structured data markup, the rich snippets kind of come and go depending on changes on our side.

But they double checked and they said there was actually a bug and it should be fixed, it should be getting fixed soon, so they will show up a little more visibly now.

So good news for those who saw their CTRs drop visibly with the reduced number of review stars, although not so good for those sites without that that actually benefited from their competitors not running them.