Little Houses by ArtEva: 361 customer reviews Google couldn't see

What was wrong

The first warning came from Google Search Console: missing product data. A closer look showed the problems ran deeper than the warning let on.

The reviews weren’t in the structured data anywhere. Customers had left 361 reviews in the Judge.me app, but Google couldn’t read them, because the store’s code never output them. A star-rated result gets more clicks than a plain blue link, even in the same spot on the results page. That advantage sat unused.

Other data was missing too, the kind that qualifies a product as a proper merchant listing: price with a validity date, shipping cost, return terms. Some meta descriptions were missing entirely, others ran too long and got cut off mid-sentence by Google. The English and German versions of the site looked like duplicate pages to the search engine.

In July, something else turned up that Shopify itself couldn’t show: Google Merchant Center had no return policy entered for any of the 30 markets the store sells into. So that month’s quality reports for the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US all flagged incomplete return windows and costs.

What Digitum did

The work happened on a live store, so one rule held from the start, no exceptions: the store never stops, and only true data goes to Google. No invented reviews, no fake fixed shipping rates.

Shopify’s default schema can’t output reviews, shipping or returns, so a custom one replaced it. Reviews are pulled straight from Judge.me and shown only on the products that actually have them. Shipping and returns reflect the store’s real terms. In July, Digitum also added company data and a breadcrumb trail that hadn’t existed anywhere on the theme before.

Next came 166 meta descriptions, for products, collections, pages and blog posts, in English and Swiss German, trimmed to a length Google shows in full. Hreflang worked the other way round: Shopify Markets already sends the correct tags, but the theme was duplicating them. The extras came out, so Google reads the English and German versions as translations of the same page rather than as duplicates.

Five changed files went live, not a full local copy. Eva’s settings, text and images stayed untouched, and the store kept running the whole time.

For Google Merchant Center, Digitum built its own access to Eva’s account and ran its first diagnosis in July: 1,231 products, none rejected, 94 warnings. Some of those warnings were false alarms and were deliberately left alone, because fixing them would cost more than they’d gain. The price mismatch comes from showing prices in local currency, which helps international buyers. A single fixed price for dollhouse add-ons isn’t even required under EU law.

The return policy was a real gap. It was entered for all 30 markets by the end of July, using the wording from Eva’s own returns page. Mid-August brought a real outage: Google rejected 175 products because Merchant Center had no shipping coverage for Cyprus, where Shopify sells. Shipping for Cyprus was added, and the products went back to approved status.

In between, Google announced it was retiring the interface the tool runs on. Digitum handled the migration and checked it live three weeks before the deadline, so Eva never noticed a thing.

The result

The store now passes Google’s rich-results test as valid, structured data is live across the whole catalog, the 166 descriptions are published, and hreflang is clean. Merchant Center has zero rejected products, and return and shipping terms are entered for every market. The sitemap has also been submitted to Bing, for both domains separately.

Merchant Center measured product visibility in Google search directly too. June logged 211 product impressions, July 3,290, almost fifteen times more. Clicks stayed at 2 over the same period, so the ratio between impressions and clicks dropped. That’s expected when the set of shown products expands fast and demand hasn’t caught up yet. Separately, in organic search, the site passed 10 clicks in 28 days for the first time in August, after first passing 5 in June. Small numbers, but a doubling in two months.

The most recent Google alert about a drop in products came on August 16th. Checked live, none rejected. Google was just reprocessing the same wave.

What the client says

“I worked with Digitum on SEO for my ArtEva online store and on the technical setup in Shopify and Google Merchant Center. Before that I’d had a fair few problems with product visibility in Google: data and descriptions were missing, and star ratings weren’t showing up properly at all. Everything got sorted quickly, reliably and very professionally, and above all I was glad the changes were actually visible, with the site and products in Google now working the way they should. Communication was clear and friendly throughout, so I’d happily recommend Digitum to other small businesses looking to improve their online presence.”

Eva Kancler, owner of ArtEva

Who this is relevant for

If you sell online and have happy customers, but their reviews aren’t showing up in Google, the cause is almost always technical, not content. The same goes for Merchant Center warnings, which most store owners leave alone because they’re in English and look harmless. At least one of them usually isn’t.

Email filip.klinc@digitum.si and tell me what you sell. I’ll take a look and tell you what’s actually wrong and what can stay as it is.