GD Star Rating 1.9 is just released with one purpose only: to improve and complete support for Google Rich Snippets. Up until now plugin supported only microdata format for snippets, but now this is updated with support for RDF and microdata. And more.
I have added new options allowing better integration of the GRS in the theme. Now you can use new setting that will insert the snippet on the action call. This will allow adding snippet anywhere in the theme, but the theme needs to support that. Info about that is on the Settings page for snippets. xScape themes are already updated and will use new snippet support. Templates used by the snippet for all 3 formats are improved and have more info that will be easier to style and will be readable if displayed as visible.
Over the next week or two, I will monitor Google search results to see if the new GRS format will be picked up. As it turnes out, Google is not using snippets that are hidden, so new options and expanded format will sort this out.
xScape themes have a special option to enable support for GRS. This will change some of the plugin settings and integrate snippet into the theme. You can see that in action on this website, bellow the post content.
loading...
Share this:
Comment Link
wow, this is awesome, great work as I have been pushing my theme developer to include microformats for some time as from a user experience for Google searchers this is a real traffic magnet, they just love the additional data included in the SERPS.
Keep up the great work!
loading...
Comment Link
We only now need to find out how and when Google decides to use embedded snippets, because so far no luck, even with 100% compliance of the rating snippets, I have yet to see any of them picked by Google. This website has PR 6, and that is very good, but still doesn’t guarantee that Google will use ratings in SERPS.
loading...
Comment Link
How do we customize what is displayed by GRS? For example on my website it shows the author, summary, rating, and date. On your website it only shows the rating. How do I get mine to only show the rating?
loading...
Comment Link
GRS is made that way and it MUST contain all elements. If any of them is missing, Google will not use it. Also, it must not be hidden on the page. The best way is to add some CSS styles for it so that it better blends into the page.
loading...
Comment Link
Thanks for the reply. I understand that I need all of it, but some of this data is duplicated because I already have the title, reviewer, summary, and date. All I need GD star rating to add to the page is the rating. How can I stop GD star rating from inserting the duplicate data?
loading...
Comment Link
If you want Google Rich Snippet present on the page, you must have all those elements embedded exaclty as plugin does it. If you don’t want GRS present, you can disable it from Settings->Special tab.
loading...
Comment Link
Ok, I’ll just modify the GD Star Rating code to remove the duplicate GRS tags. It would be nice if the GRS stuff used your T2 templates.
loading...
Comment Link
If GSR is incomplete, Google will ignore it. To have valid snippet you must have everything included right now. Removing title or anything else will break the snippet. In GDSR 2.0, snippets will be in T2 also.
loading...
Comment Link
Thanks, I can’t wait to check out GDSR 2.0.
GSR will not be incomplete, I already have title, author, date, and summary on the page.
Do you know if I can make the GSR text really small (1 or 2pt font) and Google will accept it? Or does it need to be a readable size font?
loading...
Comment Link
It doesn’t matter what info you have on page, needed info MUST be in the hreview block for Google to use it. That’s the point of the snippet to be encapsulated.
Google is vague on the info, but what I managed to find, the whole block must be displayable, meaning that style ‘display: none’ can’t be used, other than that everything should be ok, even using font color same same background.
loading...
Comment Link
Yes, I already have an hreview that covers all the content in my page. I don’t need another one.
loading...
Comment Link
Hi, the plugin looks really good, but for me is working only in Chrome. The stars are not coming with the proper links on FF or IE. Any ideas? http://taxblog.mobi/hello-world/
loading...
Comment Link
URL you gave works in Opera, Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari.
loading...
Comment Link
is there a way that category will display an average of ratings from it’s posts?
loading...
Comment Link
Great plugin!
Does deactivating the plugin delete the settings?
loading...
Comment Link
No.
loading...
Comment Link
For some reason, WordPress’s auto upgrade isn’t working for me. I figured I would just upgrade manually. Are their any files I should not overwrite (setting files or something)? I don’t want to lose any of my custom templates or settings. I just want 1.90′s newest features.
Thanks!
loading...
Comment Link
How do we customize what is displayed by GRS? For example on my website it shows the author, summary, rating, and date. On your website it only shows the rating. How do I get mine to only show the rating?
loading...
Comment Link
plugin logs date,time,vote etc…so it would be possible to use google charts to display graphs as google charts.do you plan to do that…or anyone would recommend a way to do that? i know how to display a chart for specific date but how to add whole month to such chart. event when there are no votes.
loading...
Comment Link
Yes it is. Plugin uses it for charts already on the Article panel. Google Charts are something I don’t plan to add, but data is there, you can use it.
loading...
Comment Link
How do you set the plugin to only allow one vote per day? And then be able to vote again the next day?
Thanks.
loading...
Comment Link
Plugin can’t do that directly. But it can be done by extending plugin functions.
loading...
Comment Link
Hmm…do you kknow how I would go about doing that?
loading...