Everybody wants star ratings of his reviews to be displaying in Google search. And I’d say I am not an exception too in this matter. Lazy though I may be yet when I fully realized the advantages of star rating that displays in Google, I decided to test some plugins one year ago.The plugin that really lived up to my expectations was WP Rich Snippet. This is a premium plugin that helps you display star rating in Google search results. Needless to say that it will increase CTR of your page and organic traffic will undoubtedly go up. Because when visitors search for a particular review, they are likely to be attracted more by the search results which contain star ratings too as a snippet.
WP Rich Snippet served my purpose pretty well and the schema markup by it was completely Googlebot compatible. Googlebot detected and showed in its search results all the rating snippets of my reviews created by this plugin.
Rich snippet appearing in the search result can boost your CTR manifold.
I should mention here some issues also that I faced when I used WP Rich Snippet. Last year some time after I started using WP Rich Snippet, I learned that on activating Memcached, WordPress panel became devastatingly slower. I was very concerned and nothing was making much sense. I was unable to hunt the culprit down. After all, which plugin was making the admin panel so much slow? Finally I decided to take the bull by the horns. I deactivated all the plugins one after another and it was only then that I came to know that it was nothing but WP Rich Snippet which was behind this all. I immediately contacted the plugin developer and he assured me that the problem would be fixed in the next update. Sure enough, after a few days there was a new update of the plugin and it, as was assured, fixed the problem.
But after some months, a new problem was there to deal with. I felt that server was heavily loaded and on further pressing the matter I came to know that my website was making the server relentlessly under-pressure. To cap it all, as I was using the shared hosting of A2 Hosting ( though I had the best plan of that shared hosting), I got an email from them, complaining that my web hosting account was consuming too much resources. Here let me tell you that before then my account with the same traffic had been running smoothly and I had had no issues with A2 Hosting up until then.
Again I had no idea what was it that server was finding very burdensome. As it turned out, WP Rich Snippet was consuming way more CPU than usual. When I tried to reach the support, I was told that my support license ( and update license) was already expired.
WP Review – A free way to display star rating in Google search result and in many others too.
Finally I thought that it was high time that I should look for an alternative to WP Rich Snippet. And my search ended at WP Review plugin. It can be downloaded for free from mythemeshop.com or WordPress repository. A paid version of this plugin is also available that comes with a lot of additional options. Such as, snippet styling, snippet type i.e. styling for star rating widget, criteria CSS bars, circles counter etc and much more which is not included in the free version. My main aim was to make star rating of a review appear in Google search. So I first gave its free version a shot. I installed and activated WP Review. Few days after stopping the use of WP Rich Snippet, Google search had stopped showing the star rating of my reviews. So I used WP Review to create a rich snippet of one of my posts. The post was: ”PremiumPress Review”. Within few days of updating the post, Google again started to include star rating of the review in its search results.
Just log on to google.com and type in ”premiumpress review” and you can see for yourself. You will find this post of webcusp with a star rating in Google search.
So this is the best way to make your star rating display in Google search results or any other search engine like bing at no cost at all.
If you want to style your review box as you wish or you want to make it appear in an exotic way, you for once should see the demo of its premium version.
