Back in may, Google announced the new feature for the search engine, called Rich Snippets. Using microformat or RDF you can add pieces of code that will Google find and use with search results. So, I decided to add support for rich snippets for both reviews and ratings.
Currently, Â Google supports rich snippets on people and ratings. People are read from vCard elements, and many themes format comments semantically correct for Google to recognize it. GD Star Rating now has a range of features to activate and control what goes in the rich snippet for rating. Code is added to all posts and pages if set criteria is met.
At the moment Google has the specification published, but not everything is fully implemented, and not everything can be tested. Description part of the snippet is not used right now, and RDF support is also buggy on their part. Also, there is no guarantee when the snippet will be used, because this is still new feature and will take some time for Google to use it always. But, it’s best to be prepared. Also, if you use Google custom search engine, you can always use snippet results if they are found.
So, plugin right now supports Microformat implementation for standard rating and review, multi rating and review and thumbs rating. On the settings panel (last tab, specials) you can select what goes into the snippet result and you can also enable (this is enabled by default) or disable the whole feature. Here is how the example result looks like in the Google search results (generated using testing tool):
Review Example
When you insert rating, output will be different and will show number of votes instead of the name of the reviewer. Due to the specification, Google accepts any range for ratings, but always will normalize that to 5 stars max with half star step. So if your post has review of 8.3, Google will display that as 4. I will follow closely changes in Google implementation, and will adjust code and implement whatever they add new to rich snippets for reviews and ratings.
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that’s a pretty big feature, i like it a lot. great work!
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Superb feature, will attract a lot of search traffic.
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Wow, this is a really cool feature Milan! As Donnacha says, it will surely attract a lot more search engine referrals, as the visual difference will divert attention even if the homepage is ranking fairly low for the search term.
Wow. Good work man!
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Is it possible that only the Message Poster (admin) gives a review mark, and that is showing in google. The rating of replying members is not showing on Google.
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Google Rich Snippet settings allow you to select what type of rating (or review) will be made into snippet. Check it out on the Specials tab on Settings panel.
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MillaN you are my Hero. There I said it
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Just a simple question.
In settings, under “Embed Google Rich Snippets”, should I choose “Multi Review” or “Multi Rating” ?
In my blog users post comment with the multi review rating and it adds to the rating of the post. I want to show average rating of the post taken from comments to Google.
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About the decimals in rating results.
I managed to add decimals (3.5 to 3.235) in rating results by altering render.php in /code/ts but this only affects the widgets using the T2 template system. I would like to add decimals also to widgets coded into theme templates using Builder code. Where is the “render.php” for these?
Thanks.
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