Google seems to have taken out the whitelisting process for several types rich snippets, most importantly the review and review-aggregate types. In the process they have also made some changes to how combined author / rich snippets are shown. Let me run you through what I’ve seen over the last few days.
Review snippets for everyone
For a while now, I had review snippets showing on my blog posts and pages here on yoast.com that I’d marked up appropriately. Over the last weeks I started noticing that I was seeing more rich snippets show up in more and more SERPs on sites that had not had them before. Yesterday I did a post on my Dutch blog to test this. I added a plugin called GD Star Rating, which allows people to rate posts.
This plugin has the ability to add rich snippet markup, but does it in a rather “hackish” way by hiding it:
It was good enough for testing though. I published a post about favicons, immediately gave it a 5 star rating myself so when Google spidered it, it had a rating, and low and behold, within the hour, this was showing in the Dutch SERPs:
Immediate rich snippets… You used to need to be whitelisted for this, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. I’ve tested this with both microformat hreview markup and schema.org markup and both work 100% fine, even when hidden. That last bit is “new” as Google has always stated that you should not hide your code for rich snippets, which is also what I disliked about GD star rating. In most cases though, it’s absolutely unnecessary to hide the results, you’ll want to show them with stars and you can still make that machine readable too.
The conclusion here is simple: if you have reviews and you haven’t marked them up as a rich snippet yet, go do that immediately. I’ve written how to’s on hreview & rich snippets for WordPress and on rich snippets for Magento in the past, use those. For some of my clients I’ve seen as much as 20 to 30% uplift in the past, on the same rankings, when getting rich snippets, just because more people clicked on those results.
Combined rich snippets and author highlights
If you do a lot of searching for WordPress related terms in the English Google results you’ll know that I have a so called “author highlight”, based on the rel=author markup (for which you do still need to be whitelisted):
These aren’t live in any other languages than english yet, so that’s why you’re not seeing that for my yoast.nl domain yet. A while ago, the combination of an author highlight with a rich snippet for a review would look like this:
Google dropped the +1 button recently, as in, it only shows on hover now. But what also changed is how this rich snippet is displayed, the author image is made a bit smaller and now the result looks like this:
While it looks a bit less “prominent” it actually takes up a bit more space in the search results and shows the authors name twice, which seems weird to me, so I think they’ll change at some point too.
Other rich snippets
It seems as though you still need to be whitelisted for other types of snippets. For instance, I implemented the new software application snippets for my WordPress SEO plugin and Google Analytics for WordPress plugin pages, which would look something like this according to the rich snippets testing tool:
But those aren’t showing yet, nor are the reviews embedded in it.
Conclusion
There’s no more reason to wait with adding rich snippet markup to your pages, you really should just do it right now. I very much doubt whether this will continue to be as easy as it seems to be now though. It seems to me as though this is to easy to spam and no doubt affiliates will make a lot of use of this “feature”. My guess is that soon we’ll be wishing for Google to go back to actually white listing websites for rich snippets for reviews as well, because are results have become too cluttered.
Check out this video from when Google introduced Rich Snippets:
that’s nice. my response from google team, after folloing your tutorial was “rich snippets is not for everyone”.
yes this is an advantage, but there is risk here that without better Google verification of the legitimacy of reviews in particular, that this is can become a SEO war.
Absolutely, hence my conclusion.
I have added code before two months but no snippet still now. Don’t know why? BTW thanks for this great post.
Hi Joost, great post.
I noticed this around November 20th, 2011 in Google’s German Index. Submitting the Rich Snippet Form still seems to be mandatory, but Rich Snippets appears just a few days later.
To be honest, combined Authorship Markup looks poor to me. Users would not recognize a difference between this and the normal “XXX shared this” below the search result which shows up for shared Posts on Google+.
This “Review by Joost” seems to be an issue when there is just one Review on your page. Google seems to match this Review to any author markups on the page. Weird.
Suggestion for your SEO Plugin: Use (RDFa) Markup for the Bread Crumb feature as Google seems to have problems with parsing traditional Bread Crumbs just by a separator sign (»).
Bye
Marco
This is kind a tricky Joost. Because if we go on whitelisting things then only popular and verified site’s would’ve the monopoly and dominate the first page with these snippets. So IMO it’s a good move from google to make it open and allow webmasters to tweak the code in order to make the snippets available in search results.
Hello Yoast,
I have been reading about microformats lately, and i’m wondering… i have a Linux portal with news, reviews and tutorials about linux stuffs. What type show i use? hReviews, NewsArticle, BlogPosting… what one?
Also, do i need to follow only one? I need to add some kind of markup on my telling the browser and Google i’m using it?
Well, you’ve named them all, in an ideal world, you’d use them all for the appropriate pages.
So if i post a review of let’s say, Ubuntu 11.10, i use hReview. If one of my team mates make a post about a new version of Ubuntu, he should use NewsArticle and if other one post a tutorial, BlogPosting?
That sounds easy but… how would i do it on the template? Some of the formats are easy, after all “author” is used on all them for example. But some just aren’t, specialy for someone who doesn’t understand php prety well. Is there a plugin i can use to study the case?
Thanks for the really quick answer btw ^^
I have legitimised it on our site by taking the ratings that trustpilot.co.uk has given us and added it as a rich snippet. Even a visitor clicks through they will see it. So excellent news for us if the results come in tomorrow.
Thanks for the heads up on this one yoast.
Azzam
I actually show the wp.org ratings for my plugins on those two plugin pages as well.
Hi Joost,
I noticed the same during the last weeks (by accident while testing the GD star rating plugin). I like this ratings plugin but the hreview snippet isn’t valid (it shows the information “X reviews” and the reviews are not available in the snippet).
You marked the “hidden content” as bad, do you know an alternative or is this about that “display:none” inside the html code?
Not with this plugin. Will need to do more research on that.
Hi Joost, Hi Olaf,
wrote up a piece of code to manually display GDStarRating results on desired WordPress pages, here it goes:
ID);
$rating = round($ratings->rating);
$rating_count = $media->votes;
echo '
Rated '.$rating.'/5
based on '.$rating_count.' customer reviews
';
?>
Hope that helps ;)
Hmm…seems like WordPress ate up a good chunk of that code *lol*
You can find the code here as a text file GDStarRating: Show ratings manually
Hello Fritz, thanks for sharing. Like in my previous comment, the “review count” requires some review entries. If you use the “votes” label, the snippet should be fine. Check this information from the Google page @GWT:
“count: The total number of reviews for the item. Note: Whenever you include count, the page must also contain review markup for each reviewed item.”
I inserted the code from your link to my functions.php file, but I am getting this error :
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘<' in /home/garish/public_html/……/functions.php on line 978
What I am missing ? Is the code to be inserted elsewhere ?
Moreover, without inserting any code and simply usinf GD star ratig plugin and giving my post 10 star (it is displayed on the post, too). However, it donot shows up in the snippets and here is what google compliaints of the issue :
hreview-aggregate
item fn = My Site Title
rating
best = 10
average (normalized to 5.0 scale) = 5.0
average = 10.0
count = 1
Warning: If count is specified in review aggregate, page should contain reviews. Otherwise you may want to use votes. More information about aggregate reviews.
hfeed
hentry
entry-title = My Site Title
entry-content = My Site Description
Rel
name = Permalink to My Site Title
rel = bookmark
url = http://mysitename.com/
Warning: Missing required field "updated".
Warning: Missing required hCard "author".
Please help me with this. Thanks.
In GD ratings is only one modification required: Replace the class name “count” with “votes” and the notation is according the requirements.
Great stuff! Thanks for the heads up on the “count” issue – have updated the file found under the link above accordingly :)
Fritz, I used your concept inside the function.php file and noticed that this variable is empty:
$rating_count = $media->votes;Seems like that the $media object isn’t available inside the function, does it work in the post theme?.
btw. you should use an IF clause to hide the snippet if the “count” is < 0.
I am using this inside the loop, outside you might have to use a custome query to get it via custom fields function.
And yes, it is implemented directly in the template (page.php)
The zero value thing just did not occur to me since I already had votings for every page prior to implementation ;) – sure enough it should be added though :)
Fritz,
I changed my own snippet from “count” to “votes” and the first results are already updated (search google for “preg_match_all”, it was reviews before)
Nice one :) “I see stars, I SEE STARS, everywhere!” :D
Great post Yoast!
I’m gonna try it out immediately!
Where can I rate this post? :)
Hehe you can’t yet. I’m trying to find a solution that is a bit cleaner and allows me to have the rating right where it belongs.
Good spot, I just checked my testimonial page and a book review I did. They are now both showing the rich snippets. I use both rdfa and microdata formats. This is in Australia.
Now to get that author image.
Another gem. Thanks.
On my site we offer reviews that are not based on strict criteria but rather whether or not a particular experience was deemed ‘enjoyable’ and worth your time/money. Arguably a ‘loose’ rating system like that can be of no value to certain readers.
Any thoughts on what kind of content/review structure in a rich snippet is ‘worthwhile’ so to speak?
Cheers.
Great post and recommendation on the plugin. Just installed it one one of our sites & can’t wait to see SERP effects. Thanks!
I am trying from 1st week but till now I didn’t got Rich Snippet for my blog, can any1 please help/tell me why is it??
Hi joost
i suggest you to include rich snippets to WordPress SEO ( Example : Recipes module and reviews )
Best Regards
Not really planning, most of it should be in either review plugins, such as gd star rating, or in your theme or specific plugins for things like recipes.
Hi Yoast,
I think the reason why your name is shown twice in the new snippet is because the new snippet is a combination of 2 snippets. Combination of author snippet and review snippet. And because you are both the author and the reviewer, your name is shown twice. That will change o/c if somebody else adds a review on that url :)
In the old result Google made a choice. They showed the picture of the author but not the name. And they showed the name(s)/number of (the) reviewers. I think thats where the difference is.
Dude, I realized that :) it just doesn’t make sense so I think they’ll adapt it :)
:) I don’t think they will. I think their reasoning is: there is a difference between the author of an article and the reviewer of that article/product/etc. The author can’t really review his own article/product.
What they’ll probably change in their algorithm is if author == reviewer then no review rich snippet.
:)
Of zitten we daarmee juist op de zelfde lijn ;)
Yeah I made an ecommerce shop WP based and added GD just to test a rating plugin. As products go in the WP installation as common posts. I have now little shiny stars in the SERPS for these products. Sweet and Easy .
bellapierre.es
Once again you are right on top of things! I was fortunate enough to have my authorship showing my cheesy mug shot next to some things in search results a few months ago – but it only lated for about a week. I have done some WP theme tweaking since they disappeared and reworked my rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” and all looks find in the snippets testing tool, but no joy. Sorry for whining about it here – just wish Google would be a little more clear about what exactly they are looking for.
The same happened to me. I had my moment of glory. It seems Google is now requiring you have a bit of reputation/authority before they will show your mug.
Hi Yoast,
I have added rich snippets into GD Star Rating two years ago, when Google started the support for snippets, and back then things were different in terms of accepting snippets from most website. I remember they had some limit to include only some websites. They expanded that, and there were some changes with snippets.
Option to hide snippet was added back then, because I couldn’t incorporate it into rating block rendering, but it can be disabled. Also, there is a function to render snippet anywhere in the post.
What is your suggestion to change this in the plugin?
I am no longer actively developing this old plugin, I am working on new GD Star Rating 2.0 (still couple of months out) and this new plugin is 100% written from scratch and it will have much better handling of snippets considering all the changes in past two years.
Regards,
Milan Petrovic
Good to hear that Milan, I think you should opt for doing it in such a way that it’s not hidden. If this means two options: one with hidden stuff and one where you’d have to slightly change your template for some classes, that’d be fine with me…
There will be a lot of changes, and idea is to incorporate the snippet into the rating block. This way, all the data is displayed, and the snippet is included, nothing hidden.
I hope to have it ready in the next 2-3 months, but my commercial plugins are taking most of my time for development and support. But, it is getting there, and it will be a big step forward.
Wow, very interesting indeed. I have been pondering whether or not to implement rich snippets for a while, but like you said Joost, there’s no reason not to anymore. I must find some time to add this to my site pronto!!!
Hi Milan, Yoast,
for me it makes sense to hide the rich snippet if you show the stars at least. In a post it might be easy and “good-looking” to add the 4.5, 100 votes etc. But when you have a list of rated items, etc most of the time we just display the stars but they are still valid and there should be a way to see to search engines what is the review mark.
For GD star rating, you can review and rate an both of them are inserting the rich snippet code. One option would be to just insert it (even hidden) when someone has commented/reviewed it.
You can check this implementation Cuenta Ahorro Evolución. In the beginning I let visitors rate without commenting and so you can find there are two votes but just one review in comments.
For products like that one is fair to just insert the reviews that have been written but what happen with average posts? We should also remove the rich snippets? May be if we let everybody rate any post and not only products we will have the serps full of “stars”.
May be search engines should only display the stars when the posts have been tagged with schema.org/Product.
What do you think?
BR
Hey Antonio,
you could quite easily have your SERP full of stars with this change, hence my “doubts”.
Did you notice any difference between using a 5-star or 10-star-ratingsystem?
You have to normalize back to 5 for Google to be able to understand, if you don’t it’ll never work.
Awesome, it worked! Thx a lot!
http://www.google.de/search?q=coldewey+facebook+timeline
I can confirm that rich snippets (at least for products and reviews) are showing for non-whitelisted sites – including Google.co.uk :)
We added rich snippets to our site only last weekend, and now they’re showing in SERPS.
- Without us submitting the rich snippets consideration form.
I’d expect that Google will probably only show rich snippet data (especially for products) depending on the authority of the site, and possibly the relevance of the search to the site using snippets.
Maybe this would explain why some sites that use rich snippets, who added them weeks/months ago aren’t showing up?
(or they’re slowly rolling it out across search terms/sites?)
Yeah I know at least 5 people who have implemented this after reading it yesterday and have rich snippets showing today. It’s really, really easy.
But as you conclude, this means more people will use it to spam the SERPS which will eventually see all 10 results using the star rating – yuk! I was happy being the only one in my sector doing this, ah well.
Mine are definitely showing up, my website is only 4 months old, so not much authority yet, and the snippets aren’t really relevant to my posts either, but it does pop out in Google, I can already see in analytics that I have more organic search click trough’s! Great stuff!
I added GD Star Rating to my site. I don’t have comments allowed on my home page. Will Google pick up the star ratings without comments?
Yes, I suspect they will.
You mentioned on your implementation guide about using the summary instead of description if you wanted to implement hreview on your home page.
Does that mean there is a some sort of snippet for multiple review summaries on the home page?
hreview-aggregate, for aggregate ratings, but whether that’s entirely useful is up to you.
I’m seeing hReview and hReview-aggregate a lot more now. However, has anyone noticed an increase in hProduct snippets, in the UK that is?
Hi,
by the way: If you are using a standard shop like
* Magento
* Prestashop
* Joomla/Virtuemart
* WordPress/WP Ecommerce or
* OXID eShop,
then the easiest way to get Rich Snippets is using the free GoodRelations extensions from
http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Shop_extensions
Best wishes
Martin Hepp
No stars here. :(
Is anyone able to tell me why me ratings aren’t showing up yet?
http://www.pittsburghweddingphotographer.com
Joost, When I first set up my rel=author, the test worked fine but further down the page I was told that Google would not publish my rich snippets because I was an organization. My blog is part of my business domain which is owned by a limited company. Is there anything that I can do to overcome this?
I don’t have any reviews, our site http://www.hiphopstan.com/ contains typical blog posting. Should we still be using Rich Snippets?
Is rich snippets good for blogs without reviews?
Really interesting article about snippets!All of your articles have good merit!
About the author snippet, its still not clear to me if this is also intended for articles with multiple authors. I dont mean sites where each indivdual article has just a single author (even though many differnet authors could post at that site), but site where an individual article is written by multiple authors like e.g. a science document.
Does anyone know what to do in such a case?
Very good and informative post.i liked it.Blogger Widgets.
I have been trying to install this ‘simple’ plugin for sometime now. I am experiencing some problems, the testing of the snippet fails:
http://www.golfoptions.co.uk/hotels/ac-nuevo-portil
Warning: No rich snippet will be generated for this data, because it appears to include multiple aggregate reviews of many items, instead of a single aggregate review of one item. More information about aggregate reviews.
Any advice appreciated.
I’m tempted to do it now, and I heard you encouraging the same, but I can’t help feeling like you are about to recommend or CREATE something better so I really don’t want to duplicate effort across 100 sites :-). Milan is a couple months off also… Keep us updated!
I’m also seeing fast take up of breadcrumbs. I’ve added them to a few client websites in the last few weeks and they are all starting to show as Google re-indexes the pages.
I cant figure this out, is there a way to get auto rating on GD using custom fields? trying for 5 hours with no effect. I see rating on google but what I need to do is to make it automatically?
Rich snippets made simple. Thanks Yoast!
There weeks ago I’ve saw 2 Arabic websites with rich snippets , the funniest thing is that one of ‘em is a flash games website .
Finally I got it working that my Google+ profile photo shows up beside each snippet inside the Google results, but now are all star ratings gone. Is this because of the profile image or because Google has changed the rules (again)? Anyone else with the same result?
I’m really surprised by the hidden code still being respected by Google. That’s an interesting piece to watch.
Hello,
After implementing GD star rating and then testing on Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool, my posts are coming with stars and my Google+ profile image, but it shows warning message as
Warning: If count is specified in review aggregate, page should contain reviews. Otherwise you may want to use votes.
Please suggest me the solution for the same. I went through above comments, but could not find place to change class name. Please help.
Thanks
Do you think this will work on my site? http://www.polisonico.com it’s in spanish
Tried on my web site but does not function! Did you know why? I’m using right now WP Custom Rewiev and it’s ok. It will be nice if you include something like that on your SEO Plugin.
I can’t believe I missed this!!
I’m gonna dig straight into more rich snippets. Thanks Joost!
I implemented rel=author. How do I get my site whitelisted?
Thx for the great article. Is there a way of changing the aggreate review markup “count” to “vote” within the plugin?
thx
The real problem with Google is ‘will they continue to support snippets?’ – the doubt comes from +1 button, image sizing from bigger to smaller and maybe hidden completely one day. So, are these things going to be temporary?
I love your post, but reading through some of these, I feel a bit overwhelmed, I guess I don’t full understand snippets and what they do, Maybe I need to read this post again, and then again ;)
Going from Dreamweaver to WordPress has been a new world of learning.
I have been using your plugin to generate SEO and i must say its a great tool you have provided us. One thing i dont really understand is what does it mean In simple language to a newbie like me to have rich snippets? Thank you!
John
Rich Snippets are augmented search results for your site / page in the Google results and there is evidence that this will draw more people to your site. See examples here:
http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/GoodRelations_for_Semantic_SEO
And a How-to to get them here:
http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Quickstart
Best
Martin Hepp