hReview, What’s The Fuss?
hReview is a specific microformat intended to designate review content in a webpage and allow it to be easily found and indexed by search engines like Google and other web applications. Taking existing XHTML or HTML tags, passed in a systematic way, you can make easy distinction of what your data is about for search engines, when using microformats. Other specific microformat examples include hCard which contains contact information, hCalendar which is used for events, and hProduct to describe products. Microformats do not affect how your web page renders in a browser, they simply make your source code smarter and have an impact on how web applications and tools collect, understand, and process the information in your web pages.
Within the hReview microformat there are several properties. The properties include the date and time the review was written, the author or reviewer, the item that was reviewed, the rating given to the item, a permalink and a brief summary. Have a quick peek at: http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview-profile if you have specific formatting questions about the hReview microformat or any of its properties.
To learn how to create a review site to easily and automatically integrate the hReview microformat, check out this article: Create A Review Site
When using the hReview microformat and its properties in your source code you will be at an advantage in the Google SERPS. You will be feeding information to Google to use its Rich Snippets feature. Google defines this feature as ‘giving users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance’. You can see a rich snippet summary of reviews made for Piccolos Restaurant for example when doing a Google search for ‘piccolos italian restaurant’. With this rich snippet, the Google searcher can now see at a glance, a quick summary of the reviews for the particular product or service they were searching for. Google only pulls this data from your site if you are using the hReview in your source code.
To see the different types of review sites marketers use, with examples, read this post: Review Site Types
The simple addition of hReview tags to your web content can turn a simple site into a review site. It can enhance your listing in a web surfers search, giving them the chance to see useful and relevant information from your page making it more likely for them to click through to your content.
Comments
Leave a Reply