A good review schema markup tutorial?
-
Howdy Moz,
Still kind lost of review markup and the best way to get it implemented into a Wordpress site. Any suggestions on a good tutorial that walks you through the process?
-
Hi Imedia,
Smart questions. Let me explain how to differentiate these two forms of user generated content.
Reviews: These should be posted directly by the customer on third party platforms (think Yelp, YP, etc.). You should never post a review on behalf of a customer and should not set up a station in your place of business to collect them from customers. Always let customers post reviews on their own, using their own accounts. Also, never take a review off a third party site and re-publish it on your website. You can link from your website to your review profile on third party sites, but do not re-publish the reviews found there. Further, do not encourage customers to post the same review across multiple sites. Be sure to read the guidelines of each of the major review sites so that you know what is allowed in terms of solicitation. For example, Yelp forbids you to ask customers for reviews. They want it to be completely spontaneous. Google doesn't mind review solicitation, provided you are not specifically asking for positive reviews. All reviews should be unbiased. Here is a super page in our new Moz Local Learning Center that links directly to the review guidelines of top platforms. This should really help you: http://moz.com/learn/local/understanding-review-guidelines
Testimonials: These are reviews of your business that you are receiving orally or in writing from your customers and then publishing directly on your own website. Do not ever publish these on third party sites, as if you were the customer. Only publish them on your own website. You can put them on a single testimonials page, or you can seed them on different pages, as appropriate, throughout your website.
It's great to earn both reviews on third party sites and testimonials on your own site. Both assets make you stronger!
There is a paid tool you might like to know about if you're getting serious about creating a review and testimonial acquisition campaign. Check out getfivestars.com. This is a unique and very powerful little tool that walks your customers through a process of leaving feedback and then being guided to either leave a testimonial or review. It also allows you to intervene with a customer who had a negative experience, lessening the chances of them leaving a negative review. You can, of course, handle review and testimonial acquisition manually, but you might at least like to consider GetFiveStars if you're considering implementing a really polished, concrete campaign.
Hope this helps!
-
Sure does make sense! Quick question about the source of the review. You always want to get testimonials from clients as reference of your good work. However, these are self generated while reviews are done independently. Is it proper to use the testimonials or the review?
If testimonial, how do most handle ratings?
If it is the review, what about potential duplicate content issues?
Thanks for all of the education!
-
Hi Imedia,
Basically, all you have to do is go to the app William has linked to. You can use this to take written testimonials your customers have given you, enter them into the tool, take the code and paste it into your website on a testimonials page you've created. This way, you can have on-site testimonials which Google may also display by means of stars in their main SERPs. Does this make sense?
-
Depending on the amount of reviews you need to mark up, this tool may be all you need: http://schema-creator.org/review.php
Just embed the generated code and you'll be good to go, or it will at least give you a good start.
There are also Wordpress plugins that allow this sort of generation in the backend.
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it a good strategy to link older content that was timely at one point to newer content that we would prefer to guide traffic and value to
Hi All, I've been working for a website/publisher that produces good content and has been around for a long time but has recently been burdened by a high level of repetitious production, and a high volume in general with pages that don't gather as much traffic as desired. One such fear of mine is that every piece published doesn't have any links pointing to when it is published outside of the homepage or syndicated referrals. They do however have a lot (perhaps too many) outbound internal links away from it. Would it be a good practice, especially for new content that has a longer shelf life, to go back to older content and place links pointing to the new one? I would hope this would boost traffic via internal recircultion and Page Authority, with the added benefits of anchor text boosts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajranzato91 -
Productontology URLs are 404 erroring, are there alternatives to denote new schema categories?
Our team QA specialist recently noticing that the class identifier URLs via productontology are 404ing out saying that the "There is no Wikipedia article for (particular property)". They are even 404ing for productontology URLs that are examples on the productontology.com website! Example: http://www.productontology.org/id/Apple The 404 page says that the wiki entry for "Apple" doesn't exist (lol) Does anybody know what is going on with this website? This service was extremely helpful for creating additionalType categories for schema categories that don't exist on schema.org. Are there any alternatives to productontology now that these class identifier URLs are 404ing? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Aggregate review schema
Hi Guys, Im working with a SaaS client in the flatmate sharing industry and I need to ask the following: Here's a screenshot showing the reviews people have submitted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | niclaus78
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ra6cdb5w609o8d/Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 2.46.12 pm.png?dl=0 1-Is there a chance Google will include these reviews as it doesn't have a way of checking if they are real? They are in this case so that's why would be great to include them. 2- the stars don't seem to be in html, how can we mark the stars to be indexed by google? I want to include this schema
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/reviews#aggregate_ratings I don't think we would be able to full-fill these items, what do you think? <code>spanvocab="http://schema.org/"typeof="Review"> <span< span="">property="itemReviewed"typeof="Thing"> <span< span="">property="name">Super Book This is not a boook is a service, what should I put here?</span<></span<> <span< span="">property="author"typeof="Person"> <span< span="">property="name">Joe</span<></span<> <span< span="">property="reviewRating"typeof="Rating"> Rating: <span< span="">property="ratingValue">7</span<> out of <span< span="">property="bestRating">10</span<></span<> <span< span="">property="publisher"typeof="Organization"> Whato this property means? Reviews are made by customers not organizations. <meta< span="">property="name"content="Washington Times"> same as abobe, they are not publishers.</meta<></span<></code> If you could help me it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks <code>Nico</code>0 -
Reviewing Category & Tag policy - Update
I recently (http://moz.com/community/q/less-tags-better-for-seo) started reviewing my category and tag policy, and things have been going very well. I thought I would share what I have done: Removed all tags from site Added unique descriptions for each post for the category excerpt. Only had the category description on the first page and use the description like a post to summarise and interlink to sub-categories or posts. This keeps pages from slipping down the number of clicks until it can be reached, improving link juice distribution. I also reduced the number of posts showing to 5, to allow more focus on the description (main part) of the category post. To add the category description on the first category page only in Wordpress, you need to go to the category.php or archive.php and change: to The overall aim was to have a hierarchal resource contained in the category page description. Whilst this is still a work in progress, you can see an example of what I am trying to achieve here: https://www.besthostnews.com/web-hosting-tutorials/cpanel/ https://www.besthostnews.com/web-hosting-tutorials/cpanel/mail/ If you have any further tips and advice as I continue to implement this (with good results so far), please feel free. Also, you can use the Visual Term Description Editor plugin to allow the wysiwyg editor for the category descriptions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheWebMastercom1 -
Pagination on a product page with reviews spread out on multiple pages
Our current product pages markup only have the canonical URL on the first page (each page loads more user reviews). Since we don't want to increase load times, we don't currently have a canonical view all product page. Do we need to mark up each subsequent page with its own canonical URL? My understanding was that canonical and rel next prev tags are independent of each other. So that if we mark up the middle pages with a paginated URL, e.g: Product page #1http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2" />**Product page #2 **http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=2"/>http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692" />http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3" />Would mean that each canonical page would suggest to google another piece of unique content, which this obviously isn't. Is the PREV NEXT able to "override" the canonical and explain to Googlebot that its part of a series? Wouldn't the canonical then be redundant?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Don340 -
Focusing on Multiple Niches for one site: good or bad?
Is it wise to focus on multiple niches for one site, rather than zoning in one or two different niches? On one hand, you can target many more topics and go after tons of keywords, but on the other hand doesn't google get confused of what your site is really about? Won't google just focus on one of the niches that you provide more than all others? Any input would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Is my schema implemented correctly and not spammy?
i already used the validation tool from Google. It tell's me it's implemented, but i would like to know specifically if everything is implemented correctly and in a non spam way. Here is a product link to test: http://www.suddora.com/pink-sweatbands-wholesale-pink-wristbands.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule1 -
Are micro formats and schema.org a worthwhile investment of my time?
Hi all, I recently watched this webinar http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/microformats-real-life-use-cases and it was very good, but I'm not entirely certain if this is a worthwhile thing to be doing? I have a couple of websites I'm improving the SEO on, and things are slowly picking up but I'm not sure if I should be spending time working on improving my landing pages (once these have been identified) or working on the code side of improving my SEO position. When improving my landing pages I'm asking myself the following questions: What is this page about? (Is it clear through headings or introduction text / imagery Does the page sell the benefits of the product / service in a clear manor? Does the page explain what the product is all about? Is the information easy to read, well positioned on-screen and is the content optimised for 1, maybe 2 distinct keywords. Is there an easy method of communication to the site owner if the visitor is interested in the product or service and wants either a quote or wants to find out more. Are there a few links to other relevant areas of the site Granted at the moment I'm in the process of teasing the relevant information out of the client but that's like trying to get blood out of a stone, so I'm exploring other avenues, while they get more content. I am considering going down the route of guest blogging, to possibly get a one-way followed backlink, but again this seems like a lot of effort with no clear guarantee if my efforts in doing this will pay off in being able to generate more leads / enquiries from the websites. Would anyone like to share their thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blacey0