Seeing Stars in the SERPs – Rich Snippets and Structured Markup

We’re all used to seeing star ratings in the SERPs for things like movies (IMDB/Rotten Tomatoes), products (Amazon) and restaurants (Yelp). Over the past month or so, I’ve noticed them appearing alongside listings/rich snippets in the organic search results for regular websites and blog posts. This seemed out of place to me, so I did some research. As it turns out, it’s pretty simple to get a star rating in the SERPs for any old run-of-the-mill page. I used the following format to add a “review” to the homepage of johnvantine.com. <div class="hreview"> <span class="reviewer">Name of reviewer</span> <span class="dtreviewed" title="YYYY-MM-DD">Date of review</span> <span class="summary">Review summary</span> <span class="description">Review body</span> <span class="rating">Numerical rating (from 1-5)</span> </div> The review is not fake, mind you! It was written by Ryan Farrell. Anyway, I added the review to the homepage on Wednesday. I checked the SERPs on Thursday morning, and the star rating was showing up along with my listing. At the time of this writing, it still is. You’ll also notice that my meta description is being truncated – normally the full description (157 characters) is displayed, but since the star rating showed up, it’s being cut off at 139 characters. The addition of “3 days ago” is probably causing this. How is this done? In the above example, the hReview microformat was used. hReview is just one part of the Microformats standard. Microformats are used to help search engines understand what they’re looking at. When they’re added to a site, it will still Continue reading...

Source: http://www.wpromote.com/blog/seo/seeing-stars-in-the-serps-rich-snippets-structured-markup/

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