You’ve seen Rich Snippets in Google’s search results but may not know exactly what they are and how websites are adding them to their search engine results. In this tutorial, we’ll tell you what Rich Snippets are, why they are useful, and one way you can add them to your WordPress powered website.
Review Rich Snippet Example
What Are Rich Snippets?
In short, Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. You’ve seen these in Google search results already, but here’s a 50 second video with a great explanation.
Makes sense right? A more usable web experience for all. But what happens when your WordPress powered online business site doesn’t have rich snippets, but you do have a valuable product, event, or recipe that could also benefit from utilizing Rich Snippets? If you’re not using rich snippets for your content, your site may be getting left behind.
Why Do They Matter?
Displaying Rich Snippets along side your website content in search results helps your content to stand out visually from other search results. This helps users to see your content more clearly and makes them more likely to click through to your website rather than a site that does not have this extra summary information.
How to Add Review Type Rich Snippets to Your WordPress Website
Here’s another short Google video explaining the Reviews Rich Snippet markup type. This will give you a good example of what the plugin I’ll be describing below will allow you to do.
Using the Author hReview Plugin to Add Review Rich Snippets to WordPress
Watch our video tutorial on how to use and configure the Author hReview plugin.
Other Types of Google Rich Snippets
There are other types of Rich Snippets you can add to your content, although we haven’t checked if there are other plugins that allow you to add these types to your WordPress site, we’re betting that they exist. And if they don’t, it’s a pretty safe assumption that they will soon.
Events
Recipes
Apps
Please Leave Your Opinion of Rich Snippets in the Comments…
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About Adam W. Warner
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Business Blogging Quick Start
Hi Adam,
It’s time for every blogger to integrate more rich snippets into their blogs, I’ve see good results so far.
P.S. Thanks for mentioning my plugin!
I agree Hesham, I’m anxious to get out team started adding reviews to some older articles (only when relevant of course).
Oh, and you’re welcome for the mention of course! You’re the one who should be receiving the thanks for developing this plugin and making it available to the community!
So THANKS TO YOU!
Adam, I have been learning about Rich Snippets and had a question. What’s your opinion? I could see websites and business posting reviews or aggregate ratings of their own website or business as rich snippets. This is basically how they are supposed to be used but I could see it being abused by some. Someone could put up rich snippets for completely legit reviews displayed on their site, or it could just be someone put up a quickie bogus aggregate rating without any actual reviews just to get the stars below their link in the search results. I see from Google’s instructions that rich snippets do not affect a site’s ranking in search results so I guess that’s good. I wonder what people’s opinions are on that. Also I read there is a whitelist for rich snippets to appears in results, but it’s open now and not in effect. I wonder if there is a blacklist also.
Hi Mike,
I think you’ve summed it up nicely. There is ample opportunity for people to try and abuse the use of Rich Snippets, but I think this is limited by Google’s decision not to evaluate these in their ranking algorithm.
However, it is a way for smart site owners to gain some attention within results and offer their potential visitors some more meta information as a way to add value and gain trust in trying to get the click through. Adding Rich Snippets has definitely increased clicks to the pages I have used them on, but I do use them sparingly and only when relevant.
I haven’t read anything about the whitelisting/blacklisting of Rich Snippets. I’ll have to dig deeper into that.
Thanks for your comment, and thanks for following us here:)
Adam
Hmm I saw the whitelist mentioned in the comments of a blog post somewhere about rich snippets. I can’t re-find it immediately though after searching again and checking my history. It sounded like rich snippets were showing by whitelist only at first but now it’s believed that’s not in effect.
I see people are putting ratings on their own blog posts with stars showing up in search results. I see no problem with this so there isn’t really a problem with people posting reviews of their own business and getting stars in search result there either. Yes someone can just put up something bogus to get stars but you’re right, since the ranking doesn’t depend on that the desire to do that probably is limited.
I saw one business that had a single review in microdata that was not displayed anywhere on their site and it gave them 5 stars under their search result with “Review by Tom Somebody”. It’s a little odd but I guess the stars look nice
especially with their link showing around competitors’ I suppose.
Thank you and thanks for this neat blog post. It’s valuable to know you see increased clicks. I will have to weigh whether or not to add them to my pages/posts of my personal site. It’s good to know there are WP plugins out there. WP is pretty sweet like that from what I’ve been experiencing after starting to use it.
The WordPress “rabbit hole” runs deep my friend, and anything is possible with the right combination of plugins or with some custom programming;)
Indeed. I already made a plugin for something I wanted to do on my site for banner image rotation. I’ll put it up for the WP community some time soon. Pretty cool!
Mike, if you’re interested in making more plugins, you should definitely read this post http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/how-i-made-80000-with-a-single-wordpress-plugin
And, if you need experienced WordPress and product marketing advice, be sure to send me a message through the contact form and we’ll start a conversation;)