Adding Game Review Star Ratings to Blogger Posts

Search for almost any game review and you will see a few results with a row of gold stars under the title, and most without. Small Blogger review sites ask me how to get those stars more than almost anything else. Usually they have already pasted in some markup copied from a forum, it shows errors in Search Console, and nothing has changed in months.

The honest answer has two parts. You can add the structured data that makes stars possible in about fifteen minutes per post. Whether Google actually shows them is out of your hands, and the most common reason they never appear is markup that breaks a rule the forum snippet never mentioned. This guide covers what a game review needs, where to put it in a Blogger post, and how to tell a real error from a normal wait.

Why most copied markup never earns stars

Google stopped showing review stars for most kinds of pages back in 2019 and kept them for a short list of types. Games qualify, but only when they are described as software. In schema.org terms, a video game review should describe the game as a SoftwareApplication, or its more specific type VideoGame, with an application category of GameApplication.

The snippet that circulates on forums tends to mark the game as a generic "Thing" or a "CreativeWork". The Rich Results Test will often say the markup is valid, because it is valid schema. It is simply not a type that earns stars, so nothing happens. This is the single most common cause I find when I look at someone's "broken" review markup.

The second cause is missing price. Google's software app rich result expects an offers property with a price, even for a game that costs nothing. For a free to play title, the price is 0 with a currency code. Leave it out and the review may still be read, but the app result treatment is less likely.

What a single game review needs

For one critic's review of one game, which is what most small blogs publish, these are the fields worth including:

The bestRating line catches a lot of people. Google assumes a five point scale unless told otherwise. If you score games out of 10 and give an 8.5 without setting bestRating to 10, the markup claims a rating higher than the maximum and gets rejected.

Where it goes in a Blogger post

The markup is a JSON-LD script block. Blogger keeps scripts in posts when you add them through HTML view, so open the post, switch the editor to HTML view, scroll to the very bottom and paste the block there. Putting it at the end keeps it away from your opening paragraph, which Blogger may use for homepage summaries.

Do not put review markup in the template. I have seen themes that inject one hard coded rating into every post through the theme code, which means every review on the blog claims the same score. Google treats that as misleading markup, and fixing it later is far more work than doing posts one at a time.

A few habits that save trouble later:

• Keep a template of the block in a text file and change only the name, platforms, price, score and date for each review.
• Make sure the score is visible to readers in the post itself, near the top or in a verdict box. Markup describing a rating that readers cannot see breaks Google's guidelines.
• Do not add aggregateRating unless your blog actually collects ratings from many readers. A single reviewer's score belongs in review, not aggregateRating.

Testing, and what a normal wait looks like

Paste the published post's address into Google's Rich Results Test. You want to see "Software App" detected with no errors. Warnings about optional fields like aggregateRating are fine to ignore on a single critic review.

Then wait, and expect the wait to feel long. On a test blog where I marked up 23 older reviews in one afternoon, Search Console's enhancement report listed them as valid within about ten days. Stars appeared on search results for 9 of them over the following seven weeks, and the other 14 still show plain results. Nothing in the markup differed between the two groups. My best guess is that Google weighs how well the page and site are already doing in search, which no markup can change. I cannot prove that from a sample this small.

If stars disappear after showing for a while, check Search Console for a manual action first. It is rare, but that is where a policy problem would be reported.

Stars are not the whole search result

Stars draw the eye, but the title and description still decide the click. A result with stars and a vague description will lose to a plain result that promises exactly what the searcher wants to know. The basics in SEO settings most new bloggers skip and writing a meta description that earns the click will do more for a young review blog than markup alone.

Images matter too. Game screenshots without alt text are one of the most common gaps I find on review blogs, and they cost image search traffic that a review site should own. Our post on missing alt text on Blogger posts walks through fixing it in bulk.

Do one review properly this week

Choose your best performing game review, the one already getting some search visits. Add the score visibly near the top, write the JSON-LD block with the fields above, paste it at the bottom of the post in HTML view, and run the Rich Results Test until it detects a Software App with no errors. Then note the date in a spreadsheet and leave it alone for six weeks before judging the result.