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I shipped a fake AggregateRating to my own site. Then I caught myself.

DEV Community·Giovanni Sizino Ennes·28 days ago
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I shipped a fake AggregateRating to my own site. Then I caught myself. Six days into launching Vantage I had zero users. I added an AggregateRating schema with fake numbers anyway. It was day 6 after launch. The site had three signups, none of them paying. I was looking at how Jobscan and Resume Worded ranked, copying patterns, and I added an AggregateRating schema to my Organization markup. The numbers I made up were small. "ratingValue": 4.7 . "reviewCount": 23 . Nothing flashy. Just enough to feel real. I committed it. Pushed it. Then I went to make coffee, came back, and reread the diff before opening the next task. And it hit me, very simply: I had just lied in JSON-LD on a page where the second visible bullet on my pricing page is "no fabrication." A user shopping me against Jobscan would not see those numbers — Google would. But Google was not the audience I had spent six months building for. The audience was the one person about to spend £5 trusting me. I removed it the same hour.…

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