Have you ever been looking at Google SERPs and noticed how some of the sites have little golden stars under their domain that say it has been reviewed by so and so people?
I can tell you from an internet marketing perspective, that not only does this look nice, this increases the click through rate (CTR) of your website from Google dramatically. Especially if you are running a few blackhat sites and want to squeeze as much money out of them before they get hit, then this is one of the ways to increase your revenue.
So How Do You Do It?
All you will need to do is add a bit of code to the footer of each page or post that you want the stars to show up under. This will only display the stars if your site is ranking in Google and is visible to potential visitors. Go ahead and search for your site in an incognito window to ensure that your site is in fact int he SERPs before you take advantage of this little trick.
You can place the same code on every page, but I like to change the ratings of each page so it looks a lot more natural.
So now on to the code that you will need to add to the footer of each page of post. Here it is:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<span itemprop="name">Product Name</span>
<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">4.7</span>/5 based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">45</span> reviews
</div>
As you can see from the above code, you will need to change the product name to whatever you are selling. Also change the rating to whatever you want to be displayed in the SERPs as well as how many reviews you want to show up.
From the screenshot below, you can see that this method is working and the click through rate is up by a large percentage!
Go ahead and try it out on your own.
Let us know if your CTR has improved after implementing review stars for your website in the comments.
Hmmm seems rather black hat. Wont be long b4 google finds a way of putting a stop to this. They will hav to if they are going to bring the stars back properly and dop zygat .
It may be rather blackhat if you make the stars show up that other people rated that specific page. I like to add the stars and say that the website I am working on has reviewed it. That way it is a personal review from the site and seems like it would pass for okay. It is great for blackhat sites to grab a higher CTR while they still stand though.
I would like to add these star ratings to my ranking whitehat sites. Is that a good idea or no problem? If not, how can I add real star ratings to my main domain?
thanks already
It should be no problem at all. Just copy and paste the code that is in the post and place it at the bottom of your post.
How can we add a way for users to vote each post that we make? That way it won’t be fake.
There are hundreds of plugins out there that will allow visitors to rate your content/recipes/anything you want. Pick one of them and turn it to public instead of private so they do not have to sign in to your site to rate.