Product reviews diagnostics is a section of Merchant Center that offers insight into your product ratings feed. When you upload a feed directly into Merchant Center, the Product reviews diagnostics feature will display information about your reviews, including:
- If the feed was uploaded successfully.
- Errors and warnings for missing or invalid data.
- Indication if strong, unique identifiers are present in the feed.
Status of your reviews
When a feed is uploaded, the reviews in the feed will fall into one of these categories:
- Disapproved: These need to be corrected or removed. These reviews were not processed successfully due to errors in the feed. Verify that the reviews are formatted appropriately and run them through an XML validation tool. Use the 'Reviews' section in the Product Reviews Diagnostics feature to identify errors in the data feed and correct them.
- Needs review: These reviews were successfully processed but may be missing values or the recommended unique identifiers. Unique identifiers make it more likely for your reviews to appear in Shopping results. Improve the quality of your feed by correcting data issues with the help of the product reviews diagnostics feature. Learn about unique identifiers
- Ready to serve: These reviews were processed successfully and contain all recommended identifiers. No action is needed from you.
Errors, warnings and notifications
The Product Reviews Diagnostics feature in Merchant Center will display issues in the feed that you've uploaded. Use the 'Learn More' links in the diagnostics feature for guidance in correcting issues with the feed, then re-upload the feed. Consult the product reviews feed guide for an overview on how to correctly format your feed.
Error: This refers to reviews that didn't process successfully and cannot be used. Verify that the review is formatted correctly based on the product ratings feed specifications and contains all recommended identifiers.
Warning: This refers to issues that may prevent a review from appearing. To improve the quality of a review, verify that the review is formatted correctly and contains all recommended identifiers.
Notification: This refers to reviews that are not eligible to be shown. No action is required on your part and it is recommended that you take a look at our programme policies when setting up your feed.
Errors
Document is emptyThe feed does not contain any data. Refer to the feed guide for an example feed and a guide to formatting a product ratings feed.
There is data outside of the closing tag. Try using an XML schema validator to check your feed. More information about XML schema validators can be found on our Help page.
The system was unable to extract a file from the feed. Try re-uploading your feed.
The timestamp format is incorrect. Timestamps are required to indicate when the review was written and can include date, time and timezone information, for example:
2014-04-21T11:07:07-06:00
2014-04-21T18:00:00+01:00
2014-04-21T00:00:00Z
Refer to the feed guide to see how <review_timestamp> is implemented in an example feed. You may also want to refer to a standard such as the one on this page for more information on correctly formatting timestamps.
There is a processing instruction in your feed that is not using the correct syntax. Please address this issue and run the feed through an XML validator.
There is an invalid XML character in your feed. Ensure that strings and characters in your feed are properly escaped.
There is an invalid XML start tag in your feed. Refer to the feed guide for a list of correct start tags for your product ratings feed.
An invalid XML value was found in the feed. Try verifying your feed with an XML schema validator, then re-upload your feed.
Review text is missing content. Reviews without associated review text are not used by Google. If this information has been left out, please add the review text to the feed. Refer to <review> in the feed guide for details on formatting this information.
The review is missing the overall rating value. Refer to <ratings> in the feed guide for details on formatting this element.
The review is missing the review ID. A review ID is a permanent, unique identifier for a product review and is required to uniquely identify each review. The ID won't be shown to customers; however, you can use the ID to look up your reviews. Update your review feed to include the <review_id> attribute with a unique value for all of your reviews. Refer to our feed guide to understand how <review_id> should be implemented in the feed.
Your feed is missing a semicolon (;), which often follows entity declarations such as '$' and '&'. Verify your feed with an XML schema validator before uploading it.
The timestamp is missing. Timestamps are required to indicate when the review was written and can include date, time and timezone information, for example:
2014-04-21T11:07:07-06:00
2014-04-21T18:00:00+01:00
2014-04-21T00:00:00Z
Refer to the feed guide to see how <review_timestamp> is implemented in an example feed. Also try verifying your feed with an XML schema validator, then re-uploading your feed. More information about XML schema validation can be found on our Help page.
There is a closing angle bracket '>' missing from one of the tags in your feed. Run the feed through an XML schema validator before uploading it.
The feed is missing the XML declaration, for example, '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>'. Please add this as the first line of your feed and re-upload the feed.
The feed contains a pair of opening and closing XML tags that do not match. Refer to the feed guidefor a list of correct opening and closing tags for your product ratings feed.
The feed failed to parse and no reviews were extracted. Try verifying your feed with an XML schema validator, then re-upload your feed. More information about XML schema validators can be found on our Help page.
One or more entities in the feed are referencing an entity declaration that cannot be identified. Please correct this, run the feed through an XML schema validator and re-upload it.
The collection method is unsupported. The <collection_method>, an optional field, does not match with the valid values of unsolicited or post_fulfilment. Refer to the feed guide for details on what these include.
The rating value provided in the review is invalid. It is highly likely that the provided value falls outside the inclusive range defined by the minimum and maximum values. The error message for this issue in Product Reviews Diagnostics should show you the minimum and maximum values currently in your feed, if they were included. The <ratings> element contains the element <overall> with values for 'min' and 'max'. Make sure that you refer to the feed guide for instructions on formatting this element.
The review has unsupported tags. Examples include the repetitive use of punctuation marks. Due to the persistent occurrence of the issue, we were not able to successfully process this review. Please remove unnecessary symbols from the review and refer to the feed guide for an example feed.
The title of the review is unsupported and you will need to revise the <title> element with a nonEmptyStringType. Refer to the feed guide to see how <title> and other <review> elements can be added to the feed.
The top-level <feed> element should only contain the tags listed in the product ratings feed specifications.Verify that your feed contains the correct tags.
An XML error occurred while parsing the feed, and it is possible that none of the reviews were extracted. You will need to refer to the context of the error to find where it is in the feed file. For help with finding and addressing the specific error, please use an XML schema validator. More information on XML schema validation can be found on our Help page.
The system or URL is missing from the 'XML DOCTYPE' declaration. Please address this before re-uploading your feed.
There is an incorrect closing tag in your feed. Refer to the feed guide to understand how to properly close tags in your feed.
Warnings
Comment contains URLThe review contains a URL. Do not include links to other websites in the review content. For more information on this please refer to our programme policies.
The URL provided is an incorrect format. The elements <review_url> and <product_url> are required in the feed. The <review_url> is an extension of the httpUrlType and contains the link to the landing page of the review. The <product_url> is the URL of the product and may have the same value as the <review_url> element if the review URL and the product URL are the same. For details on how to format these elements, look at <review_url> and <product_url> in the feed guide.
Google matches reviews to products based on globally unique product identifiers. Recommended global identifiers for review matching are GTINs. The product ID is missing. More information about unique identifiers may be found in our Help Centre. At least one of the recommended identifiers should be added to the product data in each review for optimal review matching. Instructions for adding GTIN can be found in our feed guide. If it is impossible to provide these globally unique product identifiers, Google will attempt to match a review based on other metadata information such as SKU and product URLs; however, the matching issue may persist.
The review is missing the <product_ids> element, which is essential for matching reviews to products. See our feed guide for details on elements that can be used with <product_ids>. The most valuable product ID is a unique identifier such as GTIN. More information about unique identifiers may be found in our Help Centre.
The <product_id> type is missing. See the sample feed in our feed guide to understand how this element should be implemented in the feed.
The <product_url> is missing. See the sample feed in our feed guide to understand how this element should be implemented in the feed.
The reviewer name is missing. The <name> element is an extension of the nonEmptyStringType and contains the name or alias of the reviewer. If the reviewer is anonymous, you can indicate this with the is_anonymous attribute. Guidance on formatting the <reviewer> <name> element can be found in our feed guide.
The <review_url>is missing. See the sample feed in our feed guide to understand how this element should be implemented in the feed.
The language used in the feed is unknown. Refer to this page for the languages supported in Merchant Center.
This review has unnecessary tags. Examples include the repetitive use of punctuation marks. Please remove unnecessary tags from the review and refer to the feed guide for an example feed.
The review has unsupported comment characters (' '). Replacement characters are used to replace an unknown, unrecognised or unrepresentable character. Please remove the replacement characters from the review and refer to the feed guide for an example feed.
The <product_id> type is unsupported. Some of the values that can be implemented for this tag include unique identifiers such as GTIN. See our feed guide for details. More information about unique identifiers may be found in our Help Centre.
It appears that there is an unsupported reviewer name. Unsupported name values include full names, email addresses, phone numbers and other personal information.
- If your data contains full names or other personal information, then use pseudonyms or shorten the name. For example: Shorten Jane Smith to Jane S.
- If you're unable to remove personal information, use the
is_anonymousattribute. For example:<name is_anonymous="true">Anonymous</name>.
| Not allowed | Examples | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Full names | Jane Smith | Jane S, Jane, JS |
| Email addresses | [email protected] | Mark as anonymous |
| Handles that contain full names or other personal information | janesmithshopper | Mark as anonymous |
The review URL type provided in the feed is unsupported. The value for <review_url> must be either 'singleton' or 'group'. Refer to the feed guide for details on what these refer to.
Notifications
Low quality reviewA quality analysis of the review has indicated that it does not meet the quality threshold for being displayed and is of low quality.
The review has been marked as spam using the <is_spam> attribute and will not be displayed. Visit the feed guide to learn more about the <is_spam> attribute.