Installing Rich Snippets on Generic (Other Platforms)

When search engines can return thousands of results, you need a way to stand out. Rich Snippets are a great way of drawing attention to your organic search results. This is how you can benefit from Rich Snippets.

Rich snippets:

• Increases Google search ratings
• Displays visible aggregated star ratings for your product reviews
• Draws user attention to attract more qualified visitors
• Provides pertinent product information to improve click-through rate and reduce bounce rate

You can now install Yotpo’s standalone app and integrate your Yotpo reviews with Google and show their star ratings within Google searches. This article describes how to deploy Rich Snippets for a Generic platform.

Rich Snippets implementation overview

1. Mark up your product pages.
2. Use the Yotpo Retrieve Bottom Line (Total Reviews and Average Score) for a Specific Product API call to pull the total reviews and the average score for the specific product to populate the Aggregate Rating markup.
   It is recommended to cache it server side and update it once a day to maintain the user experience.

Marking up content

In order for Google to scan your data, you need to mark it up with tags that Google understands.You apply micro-data, associated with schema, to your page content. Schema elements and associated attributes can be directly added to the HTML code of a website page to provide additional information to the search engine’s crawlers. The markup has to correspond to Google's rules.Product markup should be used for a specific product, not a category of products or a list of products. For example, “shoes in our shop” is not a specific product.

An example of a single product page:

<!-- Begin product scope, all of the markup has to be within this scope. -->
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
  <span itemprop="brand">Your Brand</span>
  <span itemprop="name">Your Product name</span>
  <img itemprop="image" src="prod_image.jpg" alt="Your product logo" />
  <span itemprop="description">Your product description goes here</span>

  <!-- Pull the RatingValue and ReviewCount from the Yotpo API and cache and embed it in the markup, the text has to be visible and in your product scope-->
  <span itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
    <span itemprop="ratingValue">4.3</span> stars, based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">89
      </span> reviews </span>
<!-- end of aggregate rating -->

<span itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateOffer">
    <span itemprop="lowPrice">84.99</span> 
    <span itemprop="highPrice">94.99</span>
    <meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="USD"/>
  </span>
</div>
<!-- end product scope -->

<!-- required properties: "name (required)" "price (required)" "priceCurrency (required)" "lowPrice (required)" "priceCurrency (required)" -->

For example, by adding "itemscope" in the div section of the html code you are specifying that the html content written within this section is about a particular subject.

Yotpo recommends that you use the schema.org markup vocabulary. The schemas are a set of "types", each associated with a set of properties.

Validation

While implementing these schemas, it is important to test the web pages using the rich snippets testing tool. The testing tool will display the parsed mark-up information from the page. After you have added and tested the mark-up, Google will find it when it crawls your website.

Copy the URL of your web page into the Fetch URL field of the Google Developers Testing Tool and click Fetch & Validate.

This is an example of the result of a successful validation:

Google crawling

If you have marked up your page correctly and it shows the stars in the Google testing tool, keep in mind that you will need to wait approximately 24 hours for it to be indexed by Google. The waiting time depends on Google.

Google makes algorithmic determinations on when and how to display results in the SERPS (search engine results page), including snippet information, based on a myriad of factors including the search terms, etc. Even if they are coded correctly, snippet inclusion in the SERPS is beyond Yotpo's direct control.

We would recommend focusing your efforts on making as unique and compelling a site as possible in order to increase the likelihood of your products reviews displaying in the Google search.

Manipulating or changing your aggregateRating markup may lead to Google penalizing your Rich Snippets results.