New Google Places Functionality? How did this get here?

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lotar

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I'm not cool enough to upload images yet, so search for "tampa lawyer"... and notice how there is a row of 5 stars for the first position of the google places results from someone called "Mike, Tampa", and then a second row of five stars from regular reviews across the web.

This is the first time I've seen two rows of five stars on a google places page. Also, "Mike, Tampa" isn't a link... and when you click on the reviews, Mike is nowhere to be found... so I'm wondering how it got there. Is this a Google+ thing?

I wish i could upload an image, it would have been so much easier to explain....
 
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lotar said:
I'm not cool enough to upload images yet, so search for "tampa lawyer"... and notice how there is a row of 5 stars for the first position of the google places results from someone called "Mike, Tampa", and then a second row of five stars from regular reviews across the web.

This is the first time I've seen two rows of five stars on a google places page. Also, "Mike, Tampa" isn't a link... and when you click on the reviews, Mike is nowhere to be found... so I'm wondering how it got there. Is this a Google+ thing?

I wish i could upload an image, it would have been so much easier to explain....
Click to expand...

They are using hreview microformat snipit to display a review from on the website.
 
Yep; Mike is using Thesis WordPress theme, and a hreview plugin (which is freely available; let me know if you cannot find it) which brings 5 star rating on any of the post.

I must say, clever tactic!
 
So basically what has been said here, OP, is that particular keyword has serious GP pros working in it.

Move along to a different KW! :)
 
Yeah that's the author hreview plugin (uses rich snippits). If you have an existing google places ranking and this plugin setup correctly, you can get a double row of stars. Pretty cool, although I don't know how long it will last. There is also a plugin from a current WSO that does the same thing.
 
I have no ambition to go after <cityname> lawyer, heh... but I will take their techniques and apply them in orchards with fruit closer to the ground :)

iiaok said:
So basically what has been said here, OP, is that particular keyword has serious GP pros working in it.

Move along to a different KW! :)
Click to expand...
 
wow awesome thread. I've never seen that before. I'm definitely hooking this up. Rich snippets are the future. Thanks!

Can you mark this up without the plugin on a different CMS? Stupid question I think? I wonder how..
 
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I knew about rich snippets with rel=author stuff, but this is the first time I've seen it used on Google Places.
 
Which one of these do you think it is?

Author hReview
Details | Install Now
0.0.8.1
Add hReview and AggregateRating support based on schema.org, which help you increase search traffic by making SERP results more eye-catching. This plugin supports only the editorial ratings submission (edito/author rating), this means customers and site visitors are not involved in the rating or review process, this means rating reflects only the author's opinion. This plugin is written by Hesham ... By Hesham Zebida.


hReview Support for Editor
Details | Install Now
0.9
This is a plugin to allow the easy entry of microformat content for reviews (i.e. the hReview microformat) in WordPress pages and posts. It adds a button to the editor that pops up a form with basic review fields, then inserts the contents of the fields back into the editor using markup compatible with hReview. By Andrew Scott.


WP Customer Reviews
Details | Install Now
2.4.3
There are many sites that are crawling for user-generated reviews now, including Google Places and Google Local Search. WP Customer Reviews allows you to setup a specific page on your blog to receive customer testimonials for your business/service OR to write reviews about multiple products (using multiple pages).
WP Multisite and Multiuser (WPMU / WPMS / Wordpress MU) compatible.
All submission... By Go Web Solutions.
 
Well, it's just a bit of html code... so once you figure that piece out you could likely toss it in with the html editor in wordpress if you like.

A lot of people seem to forget that at the end of the day, all Wordpress does is crank out html code. You can learn from how Wordpress does it and implement it into a static html website too... Want to implement XML-RPC into your static html website?.... see how wordpress does it :)

The second link in a "rich snippet" google search has some good info on how to go about it.. I'd post it, but I'm still the new kid on the bhw playground, so I can't do it.
 
I just tried out the 'author hreview' plugin and it didn't pass google's analysis. You can use Google's rich snippit testing tool (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=&view=) and it will tell you whether or not a specific URL has implemented the html code correctly. Funny that I got the link to that testing tool from that plugin's website, and then it doesn't pass the test. It said it was missing a couple of lines of code. Anyways, you can just tweak the html yourself and save the hassle of testing plugins.
 
cruzino said:
I just tried out the 'author hreview' plugin and it didn't pass google's analysis. You can use Google's rich snippit testing tool (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=&view=) and it will tell you whether or not a specific URL has implemented the html code correctly. Funny that I got the link to that testing tool from that plugin's website, and then it doesn't pass the test. It said it was missing a couple of lines of code. Anyways, you can just tweak the html yourself and save the hassle of testing plugins.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I agree... using a plugin for this seems a bit overkill. And if a plugin breaks, you have to wait for the author to fix it... if they ever get around to it.
 
denmon law lost their double stars.. Google's getting better at detecting them. They want the snippets to be page specific.... dosn't look like homepage review stars will last long
 
This is one helluva possibility to exploit in the short-term. Make your own review ratings and enjoy the the extra clicks from all of your stars until someone reports you. Like this:

<div class="hreview" style="color:white;z-index:-5; width=1px;">
<span class="hreview-aggregate" >
<span class="item"><span class="fn">Rich Snippet Trickery</span>
</span>,
<span class="rating"><span class="average">9.7</span> out of <span class="best">10</span> based on <span class="count">4,898</span> ratings</span>
</span>
</div>

Question is: does Google care at all about reviews for ranking if they aren't coming from G or authority sites? It's a slick way to trick surfers though. If you have an online shopping site...hmmmmmm. Much better to have some "great reviews"(4,898 in this example! WOOT!) than the big "No reviews yet"
 
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