Troubleshoot your reviews feed for Google Shopping

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After you have uploaded the reviews feed, you can check the status of your reviews in Google Merchant Center > Marketing > Product reviews. There you can see the warnings and errors that are preventing your reviews from showing and the affected reviews.

This article aims to help you fix these errors and warnings to get more of your reviews to show in Google Shopping.

Status of your reviews

When a feed is uploaded successfully, the reviews in the feed will then fall into one of these categories:

• Ready to serve: These reviews have been processed successfully and contain all recommended identifiers. 
• Needs review: These reviews have been processed successfully but may be missing values or the recommended unique identifiers.
• Disapproved items: These reviews need to be corrected or removed.

How to fix the warnings in Merchant Center

1. Missing or invalid product_id

Ratings and reviews are matched to products based on a number of factors, the strongest being globally unique product identifiers, such as GTINs. 

If you receive the "Missing or invalid product_id" warning, it's likely that you're missing GTIN. You can register your own GTIN at https://www.gs1.org/standards/id-keys/gtin and add it to your product inventory in Shopify. 

Once you add the GTIN value, it will be automatically fetched to the reviews feed. But you can always check your GTIN setting here Settings > Advanced > Google Product Review Feed > Review Feed Advanced Settings to be sure that it's turned on.

Without GTIN, Google will try to match a review through other identifiers such as:

• SKU
• Brand + MPN pairs 
• Product URLs

However, these identifiers generally do not offer as good a match as GTINs. Without GTINs, Google may not be able to match all of the reviews to products.

If you absolutely cannot use GTIN, try to add SKU to your product and turn on the MPN identifier in Settings > Advanced > Google Product Review Feed > Review Feed Advanced Settings. We will use the SKU you added as MPN in the reviews feed. That way, you'll have more strong identifiers for Google to match the reviews and products.

2. Unsupported comment format

Google won't accept a review that contains a URL. For example:

You can find out which reviews are affected by clicking on View examples and either:

• Remove the URL from the reviews by editing the reviews. Please note that we will send a notification email to the reviewers so they can approve or deny the edit.

• Or remove the reviews from the feed by archiving them in the Reviews dashboard.

3. Unsupported comment character

The reviews have unsupported comment characters, which will be replaced with ��. 

You can click View examples to see which reviews have these unsupported comment characters and either:

• Remove the characters from your reviews
• Archive the reviews from the reviews feed. 

4. Unnecessary tags

The reviews have unnecessary tags. Examples include the repetitive use of punctuation marks. 

You can click View examples to see which reviews have these unsupported comment characters and either:

• Remove the characters from your reviews
• Archive the reviews from the reviews feed.

How to fix the errors in Merchant Center

1. Spam (marked by the publisher)

Spam reviews will be marked as <is_spam>true</is_spam> in the review feed and will not be displayed in Google Shopping.

Hidden reviews will also be considered as <is_spam>true</is_spam>in the reviews feed. 

If you don't want this to happen, please archive the reviews in the Reviews dashboard. We will also automatically archive hidden reviews after 7 days.

2. Low quality review

Low quality reviews don't meet Google's quality standards and won't be displayed. The most common examples of low quality reviews include:

Reviews are about shipping and delivery / Reviews have no relevant content.

Reviews about "shipping and delivery, experiences with particular merchants" are considered off-topic for Google Shopping. 

You can remove these shop-level reviews from the reviews feed by turning on this setting in Settings > Advanced > Google Product Review Feed > Review Feed Advanced Settings.

If your customers submit reviews with irrelevant content, you can archive these reviews from the feed or ask the customers to update their reviews in the Reviews dashboard.

Reviews contain personal information, phone numbers, email addresses, or URLs.

Any reviews with personal information, phone numbers, email addresses, or URLs in the content will be disapproved from the reviews feed.

To help with this, we have the PII setting in Settings > Advanced > Google Product Review Feed > Review Feed Advanced Settings.

• When PII is on, we will add reviews containing Personal Identifiable Information to the feed, but the information will be censored with "*"s. This is the default setting.
• When PII is off, we will remove all reviews with personal information from the reviews feed altogether.

Duplicate content across feeds.

Each review should only appear in one feed. The same review should not be appearing in feeds from different stores. 

In case of duplicate reviews in multiple feeds, Google may blacklist one or more of the reviews in the feed or blacklist the entire feeds. 

It's best to keep the reviews separately for each store and use our Cross-Shop Reviews Syndication and submit the feed for one main store only. 

3. Missing content

If your customers submit reviews with empty content, these reviews will be disapproved in Google. 

You can either archive these reviews from the reviews feed or ask the customers to update their reviews. 

Normally, if the reviewer submits empty content (mostly from the Single Reviews Email Template), we would use the product title as the body content.

4. Item too big

You may see the Item too big error for the following reasons:

• Your reviews contain more than 1000 attributes. 
• The content in an attribute in an item exceeds 10 KB.

For Judge.me reviews feed, it is usually because there are too many <product_ids> attributes when:

• The products have too many variants. Note that we will put all SKUs, GTINs, MPNs of a product (including the variants’) under 1 attribute <product_ids>. If this is the case, it's best to remove less strong identifiers from the products feed.
• The shop has a large number of product groups. In this case, it's best to disable the Product group feature for the review feed in Settings > Advanced > Google Product Review Feed > Review Feed Advanced Settings. When disabled, reviews will only show for the main products in the feed, but still show based on groups in the live store. 

Judge.me reviews feed will be updated daily. So after you've made the necessary changes, you won't need to upload the reviews feed again. The warnings/errors will go away after a few days while the rating might take more time to show up.