Google Review Snippets Author Name Must Be Less Than 100 Characters

Google has updated its review snippet structured data guidelines to say the author name of the reviewer must be less than a 100 characters. If it is longer than 100 characters your page won’t be eligible for an author-based review snippet, Google said.

You can find the update to the docs over here where Google wrote under the author property “The reviewer’s name must be a valid name. For example, “50% off until Saturday” is not a valid name for a reviewer.”

Google added here “This field must be shorter than 100 characters. If it’s longer than 100 characters, your page won’t be eligible for an author-based review snippet.”

I guess Google is seeing spammy long names being used in the author name fields as a way to maybe influence and trigger a higher click through rate from the search results?

Forum discussion at Twitter.