Rich Snippet History
Originally web pages were makered up with microformatting. Around the end of 2011 Google, Yahoo and Bing got together and agreed on a set of standards that were published at http://www.schema.org/. This new microdata formating is much more extensive and versitale.
It is exciting to now have one standard that will encompass just about anthing that can be marked up.
Markup Elements We Will Use
Schema.org has created standards for all types of items and many of them can be incorporated or "nested" in others. Lets take a review a review can have a reviews, a rating and the actual review. Well there are standards for all of these items
The items we are working with for our reviews
1. Products http://www.schema.org/Product
This element typically is the first microdata on the page and for our sites we only have one product per page.
2. AggregateRatings http://www.schema.org/AggregateRating
Use this element when you have multiple reviews on one page. This way Google will display the average rating and the number of reviews or ratings that are on the page.
3. Reviews http://www.schema.org/Review
Use this element to mark up all the reviews that you have. You will have one review element for each review on your page.
4. Ratings http://www.schema.org/Rating
This element is nested in the review element. The ratings allow you to enter the best and worst rating along with the actual rating. Google will take all of these numbers and convert your rating into a five star rating
It should be noted that if you have individual review markups and aggregateratings that Google will display the aggregate data in the SERPs.
Nesting Elements
It is possible and nessecary to nest elements.
Review Page Microdata Outlines
Some sites have a single review while other sites will have multiple reviews per page. Depending on your site you will need to decide how you will markup your page and you want your results to display at google.
Single Review per Pages. If you have only a single review then there is only one way you can mark up the page. Check out the outline below for Single Review Page outline.
Multiple Reviews per Page. If you have multiple reviews on a page, then you can use the AggregateRating to summarize all of your reviews to an average rating along with the number of reviews or votes.
If you decide to mark up all of the reviews in addition to the Aggregate Rating, Google will display the aggregate rating instead of a single review that includes the authors name.
Single Review Page
<Product>
- Name
- Image
- URL
- Description
<Review>
- item reviewed
- Review Body
- Name
- Date Published
- Date Modified
- Author
<Rating>
- bestRating
- ratingValue
- worstRating
</Rating>
</Review>
</Product>
Aggregate Reviews or Multiple Reviews per Page
<Product>
- Name
- Image
- URL
- Description
<aggregateRating>
- ratingValue
- best?
- worst?
- ReviewCount
- RatingCount
</aggregateRating>
<Review>
- item reviewed
- Review Body
- Name
- Date Published
- Date Modified
- Author
<Rating>
- bestRating
- ratingValue
- worstRating
</Rating>
</Review>
<Review>
This is the 2nd or 3rd or 100th Review on the page. Each review on the page is marked up with the review element.
</Review>
</Product>
Items to keep in mind
Product Markup is not needed for a single review page. It is probably better if you have it but it is not nessecary.
Product Markup is needed for the review aggregate page. When I created my first review aggreage page the stars would not display. As soon as I added the Product markup the stars appeared in the Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool.
