Back in early 2009 Google introduced Rich Snippets that allowed webmasters and bloggers to add special content to their posts that would help enhance their results in the Google result pages.
This basically added extra information to the results summary as shown below.
The image above shows one of the Google results for a search on a Samsung TV.
You will notice that the results snippet includes a star rating plus some pricing info.
This has been achieved by webmasters annotating their pages with a special markup code that tells the Google spider to add some extra information to the serps.
This may be a bit hit or miss because adding the markup code doesn’t guarantee that Google will actually include it in the serps.
But at least there is now a way of including the markup code to your wordpress blog posts quickly without having to get your hands dirty with code.
Introducing the Author hReview plugin
It looks like there have been some wordpress plugins available for some time but Author hReview by Hesham is the first that I have seen that appears to tick all the right boxes.
Hesham initially coded the plugin especially for the Thesis themes but after some persuasion ended coding it for all wordpress themes.
It’s still early days but indications show that the code is sound and hasn’t conflicted with too many other plugins.
Installation for me on the Studiopress theme used on this blog was a breeze and the only hiccup was actually trying to locate the setting page.
Believe it or not it was sitting nicely in the Settings Menu under subheading Reviews.
Putting a review box on a post is a simple process and adding the required review info and summary takes only seconds to complete.
I have used the plugin for the first time on this post and you can see that I have placed the review box in the top right of this post.
Options do allow to position the review box below the post as well as adding the stars to each post excerpt on the blog homepage.
I haven’t tested it yet but the plugin includes a sidebar widget that shows recent reviews.
Running review and price comparison websites are at the core of my daily workload and I can’t wait to implement the Author hReview plugin and see if there is increase in footfall to my pages.
Update
I installed Author hRevieww plugin on one of my review sites and added a review box to a 6 month old post and lo and behold 8 hours later both the review stars and the authors name were added to the SERPS.
I will have to wait and see if there is an increase in traffic but in the meantime I will be using this plugin in my day to day posting duties.
geez! thanks! I had been looking for this, 😀 lets me try this. Thanks for sharing mate!
Great plugin, am I able to use it on other pages or just the post?
Thanks,
Ann marie
I have used Author hReview on my site http://whisperkoolcoolers.com and it works fine but now I’m trying to use this plugin on my another website http://woodroutertable.com but the plugin option is not showing on “Screen Options” in post edit page and can not rate, I’m using “GoodNews” premium theme, can you please help? If not possible can you please tell me another similar (visually and using microformat) plugin?
I have got the solution for the incompatible problem described before. I just uninstalled the plugin and install a new plugin “Google Rich Snippets – Reviews”, it works similar like Author hReview for google SERP but there is not display of rating in post, so I edit this plugin manually and give it a similar display like Author hReview and it works like a charm.
Interesting. Have you seen any change in your traffic?
I was looking for a simlpe way to insert author review in my photography blog, I’m going to test this one right now, I’m sure that the stars increases the CTR in Google SERP.
Cheers!
nice info, i has try its to my blog and its work
but, do you have another articles that related with this but not use plugin for to do it..?
Thanks for sharing your experience with this plugin. I’ve been looking at it (and a couple others). It looks like the author decided to only improve the premium version of the plugin and therefore the free version is a bit lacking, e.g. support for half stars, etc. This seems to happen a lot of with WordPress plugins and other open-source software of this nature. I understand it, but it’s a bit frustrating sometimes…
The star rating is a great idea. Only problem is if you don’t really get ana ratings from your visitors:)