How do I get review stars in my Google Listing
Posted by owen | Filed under how to
Reviewed by SLight on
March 8th
Great post on getting stars in your search rankings
How to get stars in your search engine rankings. Another post from SLight.
My rating: stars
As you can probably tell, I’ve shoe horned rating info into my post in order to demonstrate the technique, to get the code just cntrl + U it to view source (if this doesn’t work you are using IE and shame on you, shame). You may find this useful as a template. And yes I did feel I deserved 5 stars, I mean hey why not!
Now just to warn you all this post is a work in progress, I have to leave it up to get it indexed etc but I haven’t perfected it yet, so please point out any mistakes and feel free to criticise, although not too much yeah!
The review information has been formatted in a Microformat called hReview. This is essentially tagged content which tells Google it’s a review and so Google can then choose how to treat it knowing precisely what it is. In the case of reviews it means they will include it within the search results.
There are 2 major formats here, hReview and RDFa. I have used hReview as I find it easier to use and it is seems to be the clearer of the two formats. I have also found it to be the most popular so I would personally choose this format within the scope of this project.
You can find all the information on this you need as well as some of the more advanced aspects such as using different rating scales and aggregated reviews on the Google webmaster central page dedicated to this.
I will also be covering at a later date if including this actually affects your rankings, I’m not sure but hopefully we’ll be finding out soon. Shout me in the comments and I’ll let you know when I get the results in.